The evolution of artificial intelligence continues to impact the hospitality industry in various ways. Plenty of companies are looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve by utilizing AI. Cendyn, an integrated hospitality solutions provider, is a prominent example; in March, the company advanced its business intelligence solutions with AI-enabled analysis to deliver actionable insights to hotel sales and marketing teams. Cendyn President Michael Bennett recently told LODGING that the key to “truly impactful” use of AI in hospitality is balancing aggressive thinking about this powerful tool with careful utilization, especially in an industry that is at heart about the human connection.
Bennett described Cendyn as a 30-year-old company made up of more than a dozen other platforms brought in relatively recently, “so in a lot of ways, we are a 30-year-old startup.” Among those additions are two CRMs, including the event intelligence platform Knowland and multiple booking engines—making platform consolidations the greatest challenge now facing the company. “We’re getting the singular product lines fully integrated. By this time next year, we expect to have a fully integrated platform, with the goal to be connected from dream to booking/execution,” he said.
Specifically, Bennett mentioned integrations stemming from Cendyn’s acquisition of Knowland last October and its partnership with Loyalty Juggernaut, which was announced in May. Noting the growing importance of having a loyalty system that goes far beyond their existing “generic points rewards” that require Cendyn’s customers—midsized brands in the luxury space—to “point watch,” Bennett said the time had come to move forward with an updated enterprise loyalty system. “As our customers evolve, they need more feature functionality to be able to establish relationships with other third-party vendors.” Rather than develop their own, Cendyn decided to partner with Loyalty Juggernaut, whose GRAVTY digital transformation platform was a more cost-effective way to enable brands to deliver on the digital customer expectations comprehensively. “We decided on Loyalty Juggernaut because it had a great product that works in multiple verticals and has great feature functionality.”
Bennett also highlighted how Cendyn’s acquisition of Knowland enabled the pairing of Knowland’s meeting and event data with Cendyn’s Sales CRM, Proposals, and Grouprev platforms, offering the opportunity to drive group bookings in the MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences, and events) space with a single solution.
With ongoing advancements in AI in mind, Bennett described what he called the “paradox” of achieving maximum impact via AI-enabled analysis/CRM analytics in the hospitality industry. “AI is evolving so quickly. You don’t want to be left behind, but you need to be smart, cautious,” he said. For this reason, he explained that his company is proceeding carefully, saying, “We’re extremely aggressive in how we think about AI-enabled analysis/CRM analytics in every product line but are conservative in terms of how we’re deploying it. We want to ensure that the data is meaningful, that it’s truly impactful both internally and for our customers.”
As part of this mindset, Bennett said he has reached out to others in the industry with questions: “How is your team using it? What are they seeing? What are the advantages? Probably most importantly, I want to know if it is truly accretive in their day-to-day process.”
Their responses, he said, reflect different approaches/attitudes toward the use of AI, even within Cendyn’s advisory board, which includes private equity partners Haveli Investments along with Accel-KKR. “Depending on the vertical they work in, some are really aggressive about using what are all enablement tools,” he said.
Bennett added that AI-focused approaches can be at odds with realities in the hospitality industry. “First of all, we have to remember we’re in people businesses. AI may be able to get information about guests faster, smarter, and better, but it needs to be able to support the guest experience. You can’t forget that ours is an industry that is more focused than most others on the human connection. This is especially the case with our own F&B-focused customer base.”
Finally, Bennett pointed out important legal issues related to gathering personal data, which has become an essential part of personalizing the guest experience. “While our goal is to leverage AI to acquire more detailed information on guests to improve their experience, we could find ourselves in conflict with data privacy regulations, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which was modeled after the EU regulations.”
In short, said Bennett, “There’s no stopping AI. According to Microsoft, by 2030, more than 90 percent of their code will be written by AI. Still, we have to be very careful.”
