NEW YORK CITY — Highgate Technology Ventures and the Independent Lodging Congress hosted the Indie Cultivate conference here last week. The two-day event focused on innovation, investment and technology adoption in the independent hospitality, travel and lifestyle sectors. At the conference, attendees—including hoteliers, technology companies, investors, merger and acquisition advisors and venture capitalists—discussed and weighed in on emerging trends within the industry.
Artificial intelligence and its impact on hiring, guest relations and back-of-house operations were the main topics of conversation at the conference, with several attendees promoting their own AI-based platforms. "We often think of ourselves as selling technology to hotels, and really, the end goal is—we're selling change," Stayntouch's Jacob Messina said during the first panel on creating “frictionless” guest experiences.
Wary Adoption
While there are a number of AI-based platforms from which hoteliers can choose, those hoteliers may also be skeptical of what the technology can do for them and unwilling to try it. “Hospitality is at an inflection point that other sub-verticals within technology went through,” William Blair Director of Technology Akash Patel said during the Follow the Money panel. "Think about legal software or property-management software in the residential space. All of these industries had reticence towards technology that they were able to overcome because of the competitive dynamics that they were faced with.” Following the downturn during the worst of the COVID pandemic and an increasingly volatile economy on the horizon, the hotel industry will need to follow suit. “It's either compete or die.”
Highgate Hotels’ Ankur Randev agreed that the industry needs to be willing to take risks on technology, especially as other industries make AI and other platforms ubiquitous. “We have to get better at accelerating things that will happen anyways, right?” he said.
Jessie Cai of General Atlantic noted that data is currently in “silos” across different systems, and the inability to share guest data from one system to another hinders the property team’s ability to know their guests’ expectations and secure their loyalty. On the back-of-house side, Messina said that Stayntouch’s platform tries to “automate as many things as possible” and take workers out of their day-to-day tasks, encouraging them to focus on “making eye contact, having conversations [and] learning details” instead.
"So many hotels are trying to reduce their costs, but at the end of the day, you need to make sure that your solution is going to pay for itself," Quicktext's Benjamin Devisme told the attendees.
What the GMs Want
Several hotel GMs discussed what they are looking for in hotel technology. Catherine Lee, GM at 1 Hotel Central Park, called for a "technology solution that can replace … at least three to five platforms" that front-desk agents use every day to keep the hotel operating. When companies approach her to consider adopting their technology, she added, “I don't look at them until you can promise that you will make my team members' lives easier and reduce the number of systems that they use by five.”
“The more that systems talk to each other, the better,” said Jessica LaRosa, GM of the Made hotel in New York City’s NoMad district, noting that team members often have to enter guest data twice into different platforms. “If the integration was two-way, it would make things a bit smoother.”
Octavia Marginean-Tahiroglu, GM of the St. Regis Hotels & Resorts hotel in New York, agreed, and said that if hospitality and travel technology are going to advance significantly together, "we need to find a way to make it extremely accessible in all markets."
Collaboration and Cooperation
That sense of improved cooperation and communication—both among different platforms and among people—was another topic of conversation during the conference.
Cooperation can extend to the OTA space, which has leveraged technology to build a positive relationship with guests but one of both love and hate with hoteliers. In a one-on-one conversation with Highgate’s Kurien Jacob, Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel said a main reason for the company’s existence is to try and capture whatever demand is out there from potential guests. “We can't change the demand,” he said. “I can't go out and make people want to visit. What I can do is help get the people who do want to come to come to a particular property.”
AI and Jobs
These programs are also not immune from AI, and Fogel also said that Booking.com is "using AI in ways, both in the hospitality area and in our restaurant area ... that is significantly reducing the need for human beings." At the same time, he cautioned that eliminating a large number of people’s jobs in favor of technology could backfire badly on businesses and on society at large. Noting “parallels” to the terrors of the French Revolution, he said that when there are “a lot of people who don't have bread, they get really angry—like, really angry.”
Just one day before announcing that he would leave Remington Hospitality, Sloan Dean, the company’s soon-to-be former CEO, agreed that AI can affect workers’ jobs. “AI is the death of the hotel concierge,” he said, predicting a “divide” in hospitality between automation in select-service properties and a “host-driven experience” in upscale and luxury hotels. “As robotics catch up, you’ll probably have full automation of some of the very physical departments,” he said. “Eventually, we'll be in hotels where your housekeeping department is fully automated.”
Completely automated housekeeping has not happened yet, but the Remington team is already leveraging AI in the white-collar space. “We have less recruiters because we're using AI technology to do resume screening,” he said. “I had to hire less paralegals because we use AI to screen contracts. We have a [business intelligence] platform that looks at [profit and loss] and does some inference where we have to have less VPs of ops on property.”
AI’s biggest impact on travel right now is how customers decide and book hotels, Dean continued, noting that this “presents an opportunity for hotel owners—who we represent—to look at that and say, ‘Should I brand this hotel?’ or ‘What is my OTA contribution?’”
SevenRooms' Allison Page said that despite the headwinds, she expects to see AI supporting more hotel operations and making things smoother for hoteliers: “I don't think we've reached the golden age in hospitality yet,” she said. “I truly believe it's still to come. Because the way AI can take all of this tech away from operators, give them more time back with their guests—I think it's going to be really transformational."