The Hospitality Show, now in its second year, will take place at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio from Oct. 28-30. The Show will bring together 5,000 attendees and promises to drive profitability for owners, operators and hospitality innovators through dedicated content, extensive networking and 400+ operations and technology vendors.
In this installment of The Hospitality Show speaker Q&A, we catch up with Brian Kirkland, CIO, Choice Hotels International.
What do you think is the biggest problem for the industry currently?
As it relates to technology, the biggest problem facing the hospitality industry right now is keeping up with all the changes and figuring out how it applies or can be leveraged. As an industry, hospitality is behind.
At Choice, we know that we are often leading the charge on technology, so clear roadmaps of deployment might not exist for us to follow. We’ve successfully modernized many of the core elements of our technology ecosystem while we continue to build tech tools and programs that help franchisees and make their jobs easier. We continuously invest and update our technology offerings whether on our proprietary channels, revenue management capabilities, migrating our tech stack to the cloud, or layering in AI in our proprietary franchisee-facing tools to ensure we provide a great guest experience and that our owners and operators have access to the best-in-class and latest innovations. We make strategic investments and are an early adopter of key new technologies so we can ensure we're always providing franchisees with reliable, state-of-the-art systems and tools that are intuitive and easy to use, and give them the flexibility and control to manage their business on their terms from anywhere around the world.
While Choice is quick to explore and test new technologies, we don’t always jump in with both feet. It’s imperative that our tech is practical, secure and serves a business purpose that has a ROI to justify the cost. For instance, for years mobile key technology did not have the customer adoption to justify the effort, and the technology was expensive to install and not reliable. This wasn’t an area where we wanted to lead the innovation curve. In other areas, like cloud computing, we knew it was necessary to lead the innovation curve.
What new trends do you see affecting the hospitality industry the most in 2024?
AI continues to be one of the main trends we see impacting hospitality, especially as everyone realizes the impacts you can have with the good application of AI. For years, we have leveraged AI to provide a more personalized guest journey and experience. Choice leverages AI in our intuitive search and booking experience for visitors to our website ChoiceHotels.com. By using AI, we can ensure that Choice Privileges members who are logged into our site are immediately shown properties across our 22 brands that they may be interested in based on previous bookings habits, searches and more. This dramatically reduces the booking paralysis that sometimes comes when trying to identify and book a hotel.
Another trend is the integration of AI to drive operational efficiencies, such as smart pricing and dynamic room management. For instance, we layered AI into our mobile-optimized revenue management system ChoiceMAX, so that we could provide hotels with room pricing recommendations based on thousands of regularly shifting data points. Previously, this was a massive task that owners and operators had to calculate manually. But with the use of AI and the power of the cloud, we’re now able to provide real-time pricing recommendations for hotel owners and operators in the Choice Hotels system many times per day, for every room type and rate plan.
What do you see as the biggest opportunities for the industry this year?
We are currently keeping a close watch on the developments in generative AI and how that will not only introduce new technologies, but enhance existing tools and processes. At Choice, we prioritize staying ahead of innovation and anticipate a significant shift in how AI and machine learning will create business value, ranging from AI-generated content to advanced business analytics and decision-making.
A big opportunity we expect to see is the influence of AI on marketing and search behavior. With the overwhelming number of options available for planning travel, many consumers are now using AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard to help with their itineraries. However, these technologies have their limitations, which is where hotel brands can step in to offer more personalized and customer-focused guidance. We are also collaborating with our partners to explore and understand how AI will impact booking behaviors.
A big opportunity we are exploring with GenAI is within productivity and operational efficiency. These areas are where there is tangible ROI and value, rather than hype. With developer productivity, we see increased velocity and throughput. With franchisees, we are improving tools, process, and operational efficiencies with the use of new GenAI capabilities. And there’s much more on the horizon.
What can owners and operators expect to take away from your session at this year’s The Hospitality Show?
Owners and operators attending my session at The Hospitality Show can expect to gain valuable insights into how AI and other advanced technologies can be leveraged to drive business value. We will discuss practical applications of AI in areas such as revenue management, customer service and operational efficiencies. We will also share perspective on hype vs. reality of generative AI, and what audience members should be thinking about as they explore different technologies. My goal is for attendees to walk away with helpful information and, hopefully, inspiration to leverage within their own operations.