Choice Hotels International has kicked off MasteryX, its 10th annual Mastery tech summit, a week-long gathering of 500 associates in Scottsdale, Ariz., to focus on emerging technology for the hospitality sector. Attendees of the summit solve challenges facing hoteliers through workshops, competitions and knowledge-sharing sessions in an effort to help hotels drive revenue, reduce costs and improve efficiency at both the property and corporate level.
“We truly believe that technology exists to provide business value,” Brian Kirkland, chief information officer, Choice Hotels International, told Hotel Management. “There's always a purpose behind what we're doing. It's not just chasing shiny objects.” The event, he added, is not just for tech specialists. “We invite and include everybody across the entire company.”
Value in Innovation
Previous editions of Mastery have had an impact on how Choice hotels operate: In 2023, a tool created during Mastery reduced daily tickets from 4,000 to 40 using AI and other new technologies. Other winning projects include enhancements to online travel agency bookings that yielded additional revenue and multiple security analysis and automation tools.
Last year, another project helped drive occupancy by automating the manual process of creating special rates and promotions for repeat hotel guests and packages for local businesses. This reduced time from 2.5 weeks to instant processing. “We have over 600 properties that are leveraging that program already,” Kirkland said, noting that nearly 6,000 rate packages have been created. “There's over $31 million in sales that have come from that, and over 450,000 room nights as a result of just that one make-a-thon project.”
MasteryX
At the 10th edition of Mastery, Choice Hotels technologists will explore how artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies can help improve business intelligence, enhance cyber security, improve on-property operations and scale Choice’s proprietary tools and systems.
At the summit, interactive challenges such as “Capture the Flag” (with a data-hacking twist) and AWS DeepRacer—a machine-learning-powered racing competition—aim to test participants’ problem-solving and AI capabilities. During the summit’s Hack-a-Thon competitions, engineers will develop and present new software products. The activities, Kirkland said, are to encourage attendees to learn new technology and different ways of thinking—and “to broaden their horizons.”
Winning teams will earn cash prizes, with top innovations considered for companywide deployment.
Next-Gen Tech
The event will include four keynote speakers instead of the usual two. “I want people to see what others are doing,” Kirkland said. “How are other people thinking different and doing different in the space?” Speakers will represent Amazon Web Services to talk about generative AI, Adobe to discuss marketing in the digital space and an expert to discuss quantum computing—an emerging technology that would make computers capable of solving challenges in a fraction of the time they currently need.
While Kirkland noted that quantum computing is “years away from being prime time,” he wants Choice to be ready when it becomes widely available, especially if the technology is used to attack security systems. “The thing that every company needs to be doing right now is really paying attention to this security aspect and making sure they're primed and ready for when that hits us,” he said. “How do we prepare ourselves for when that technology becomes viable and accessible for mass use, and what does that mean for us?”
As in all other segments of the business world, AI will be a hot topic at MasteryX, but Kirkland argued that the technology not only is well-established, but has been in use at Choice for years. “We were the first to roll out a revenue-management system, all based on AI and [machine learning], that helps franchisees optimize their pricing strategies and overall profitability,” he said.
Generative AI, on the other hand, is a rapidly growing subset of artificial intelligence that Choice is finding new ways to leverage—“everything from content creation for our content and our marketing campaigns [to] our emails or our website,” Kirkland said. “Our developers are already using generative AI copilots to help write code and to help them build systems in a much faster way.” The company, he estimated, is reporting a 30 percent boost in productivity among the team members who are leveraging these co-pilots for their development work.
Ultimately, Kirkland said he wants participating engineers and associates to walk away with a new perspective. “I want them to be able to say not only [that] they're experts in their day-to-day [tasks] … but they understand there's a bigger picture of opportunity and ways of thinking that they need to be tapping into on a daily basis. People get very stuck in the day to day, and they forget to step back and look at the horizon around them.”