There’s a familiar running through the hospitality industry today: Hotels are deploying AI chatbots to handle guest inquiries. Oftentimes, these implementations underperform—they misunderstand requests, provide generic responses and frustrate guests who end up calling the front desk instead.
Customer service automation sounds appealing, but most hotel chatbots are rigid systems that can’t handle nuanced requests or provide property-specific knowledge. Critically, these traditional chatbots don’t integrate with CRMs, don’t qualify leads, don’t prioritize prospects and don’t follow up or nurture them. They’re dead-end conversations; not sales tools. Meanwhile, the biggest revenue opportunity—group and event sales—remains very manual, with overwhelmed sales teams struggling to respond to RFPs in a timely fashion.
Revenue-Focused AI
Forward-thinking hotel groups are taking a radically different approach: deploying intelligent, holistic conversational AI sales assistants for both event bookings and leisure reservations.
Unlike rigid chatbots, these systems qualify every lead, personalize outreach, identify prospects most likely to convert, integrate with CRM systems and nurture leads through automated follow-up. Holistic AI sales solutions combining lead qualification, automated follow-up and predictive analytics deliver substantial returns; it’s estimated that companies using advanced AI for sales achieve ROI ranging from $3 to $10 for every dollar invested. A 20% relative improvement in conversion rate (from 15% to 18%) generates three additional bookings per 100 leads. At $25,000 per corporate event booking, that’s $75,000 in incremental revenue per 100 inquiries. For a hotel receiving 2,000 event inquiries annually, that’s $450,000 in additional revenue.
The Leaky Funnel Hotels Are Ignoring
The average hotel website conversion rate is roughly 2%, meaning 98 of every 100 inquiries don’t convert. The problem gets worse with response time. In our tests, the average lead response time was 47 hours, yet responding within the first several minutes can boost conversions dramatically. Leads reached within five minutes are much more likely to convert than those contacted after 30 minutes or an hour. While hotels deploy unintelligent chatbots for transient bookings, their event sales teams are drowning in RFPs.
For group and event sales, this delay is catastrophic. Event planners compare multiple venues simultaneously. Sixty-one percent of RFPs are awarded to one of the first three bidders, noted one Cvent study, while another study revealed that 39% of planners say hotels are too slow to respond. When your response arrives 47 hours later, the business has already gone to a competitor who responded right away. It stands to reason that sluggish, ineffective responses to sales or customer service inquiries—whether from rigid chatbots, unresponsive sales teams or inadequately trained reservations centers—frustrate customers and damage business relationships. Why does this situation persist?
Revenue-focused AI systems capture this lost business by responding intelligently to 100% of event leads instantly in any language, 24/7, while qualifying inquiries automatically, personalizing follow-up and routing qualified leads to human sales teams.
Missed Opportunities
The revenue opportunity for group and corporate events dwarfs standard room reservations. Group sales in the hotel industry reached approximately $190 billion in 2024, and corporate meetings and events account for the majority of the meetings market. Yet while hotels invest in poorly performing chatbots for $200 room bookings, their $25,000 event inquiries sit unanswered in sales team inboxes.
Consider this scenario: A pharmaceutical company researches venues for their annual sales conference—200 attendees for three days in the third quarter. They submit RFPs to eight hotels Monday morning at 10 AM. By 10:05 AM, one hotel’s AI system has acknowledged receipt, confirmed availability, provided preliminary pricing and scheduled a call with the events director for Tuesday morning.
The other seven hotels? Their sales teams won’t see the inquiry until Tuesday afternoon, by which point the pharmaceutical company is already in advanced discussions with the hotel that responded immediately. What’s more, human sales teams have not had to spend their time qualifying each and every such lead, which is a huge benefit for hotel groups.
AI systems also maintain engagement with leads not ready to book. A corporation researching January Q3 conference venues may not be ready to book until March. AI ensures a property stays top-of-mind through personalized follow-up.
Rethinking AI Investment Priorities
The hospitality industry needs to reframe how it thinks about AI. The question isn’t leisure versus events—intelligent conversational, nurturing AI works for both. The question is: Are hotels deploying rigid chatbots that end conversations or holistic sales assistants that qualify, prioritize and nurture every lead?
Run the Numbers
If you’re ready to shift AI investment from low-margin automation to high-value revenue generation, audit your group sales funnel:
- How many event and group inquiries do you receive monthly?
- What’s your current response time?
- What percentage converts to bookings?
- How many inquiries never receive any response?
Those numbers will reveal exactly how much revenue you’re leaving on the table. The question isn’t whether to invest in AI; it’s whether you want AI answering—”What time is breakfast?”—or capturing millions in event and leisure revenue.
This perspective piece was contributed by Gregory Sukornyk, CEO of Oli Labs, a provider of AI sales solutions for hospitality and real estate groups.
