“There has been a lot of buzz and heated discussions about the role and impact of AI in the hospitality industry and travel in general. I have no doubt that AI will lead to a complete overhaul of the hotel tech stack and help with solving labour shortages in hospitality.
Except for the major hotel chains, hotels do not have the financial, technological or talent resources to select, train, implement and maintain AI applications on their own.
We have to give kudos to hospitality tech vendors for the speed with which they have implemented AI in their existing technologies.
So, what should hoteliers do in 2025 to prepare for AI-dominated future? Hoteliers should start asking their existing or potential vendors – PMS, RMS, CRM, CRS, CMS, marketing, operational and back-office technologies – a simple question: “Are you implementing AI in your applications, when are you going to do it, and how will that help my business?”
If there is no clear and definitive answer, fire the vendors or don’t hire them.
As for training and implementing AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude to understand and anticipate unique customer needs in the hospitality industry, I would consider two technologies as a matter of priority in 2025:
- I will implement an AI-powered hotel-specific chatbot like Asksuite and Quicktext on the property website to handle 24/7 customer service, trip planning and booking assistance.
- I will implement a CRM technology like Cendyn CRM or Amadeus GMS to aggregate all of hotel first-party and zero-party guest data that is cleansed, de-duped, enriched and appended. The CRM technology provides “a single source of truth” for the guest data and not only creates 360-degree guest profiles, but more importantly augments guest profiles with preferences, social media ambassadorship, customer engagement data, etc., which enables hotel departments to do their job more efficiently and effectively. For example, operations can now anticipate guest requests and preferences, and personalise customer experiences; Marketing can finally embark on one-to-one marketing and can significantly increase customer engagements via similar audiences marketing.”