Artificial intelligence in the hospitality industry is changing the way hoteliers do business, giving more possibilities to creating a seamless hotel experience, while at the same time helping to drive growth and optimize revenue.
There are many technological advances in the way of artificial intelligence that can help give you an advantage over the competition. By interpreting important data more accurately and efficiently, automating daily operations in order for your staff to focus on providing the best service possible, and improving the overall guest experience, you can be one step ahead.
AI provides the opportunity to enhance the customer experience and increase guest retention. In this article we will look more in detail about AI, its advantages, and how to use AI in the hospitality industry to catapult your hotel above the competition.
Table of contents
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is essentially a computer’s or a robot’s ability to take over tasks that would usually be performed by a human. In the hospitality industry, it has the ability to enhance the user experience by personalizing services and offering virtual assistance through automation and big data. It has a variety of functions, of which we will discuss in more detail below.
When we think about AI, it’s everywhere in our daily lives, such as when we activate Siri on our iPhone to tell her to call one of our contacts, or when we ask Alexa to turn the music down. AI has become such an integral part of our lives that perhaps we don’t even realize just how far it has penetrated. It’s changing the way we interact with the world and allowing us to optimize processes, services and improve know-how.
What are the advantages of using artificial intelligence in the hotel industry?
There are many advantages to using artificial intelligence in the hotel industry. It can be used to enhance the customer experience by fully understanding the customer journey, better profiling guests and discovering what they’re looking for in order to improve service.
It can decrease human involvement in the everyday tasks that go into running a hotel, which leads to less human error, saves you money, and allows you to deliver a top-notch service. With the help of concierge chatbots, your hotel is able to handle guest requests quickly and easily so that guests feel like they’re getting their needs met in a timely fashion, which also frees up your concierge to manage requests that machines are unable to process.
Top-notch service starts with understanding what it is your guest wants, and by using this machine-based learning, you can better customize your offer by collecting data that allows you to adapt your offer to those learnings. Implementing a property management system, which uses machine learning to interpret big data, allows you to better take care of revenue management and make data-driven decisions to improve your sales and operations.
Learn about how to use big data and machine learning to increase sales.
How to use artificial intelligence in the hospitality industry
There are many ways to use artificial intelligence in the hospitality industry. Let’s take a look one by one.
Chatbots
Chatbots are without a doubt one of the best ways to provide an optimal service. This also frees up your human resources to take care of more important tasks.
Chatbots can be used to answer frequently asked questions, and handle concierge services and housekeeping requests such as to get extra pillows or blankets delivered to the room. Not only can these requests be dealt with more easily, but they can also be handled more quickly; with our instant gratification culture, being able to take care of guest’s needs in a timely fashion is key to offering great service.
Data analysis
Now more than ever, with the help of this kind of technology, data analysis can be conducted more efficiently in real time. Data can then be quickly sorted, interpreted and applied so that your hotel can draw conclusions about performance data and put into practice the learnings. This will help you better understand your target guests based on your current guests, and allow you to adapt your strategies in order to attract a different target audience. Machine learning also makes it easier to collect, store and analyze data from various online sources.
Better serve guests who speak a variety of languages
With the help of different AI technology, you can better serve guests coming from different countries and speaking a variety of languages. Chatbots can be programmed to speak a variety of languages, or you can install a live translation app into your website that adapts to the audience based on artificial intelligence. Having the technology in place to serve a multilingual population will allow your hotel to appeal to a wider range of guests and make you less dependent on hiring multilingual staff.
Voice activated services
In-room technology provided by voice-activated services is a great way to provide a seamless guest experience. You can program the voice activated service to dim the lights, put on music, help with a variety of concierge-tasks such as setting a wake-up call, among other things. This is a great way to improve customer satisfaction because guests can have their needs instantly met.
Hyperdynamic pricing
Hyperdynamic pricing based on AI can be used together with booking engines to automatically update prices based on user data, information compiled from social media about potential guests, as well as market data to display rates that will maximize profits. This can be updated in real time based on current demand trends. The software is getting better all the time, but the idea is to use data available on social media about the user to offer hotel rooms or offers that most appeal to a potential target group.
Find out about dynamic pricing in hotels.
Conclusion
The hospitality industry without a doubt has a lot to gain with the integration of AI into the guest experience. It allows you to know your clients better in order to offer a better and more personalized service, so you can go beyond your guest’s expectations. From multilingual chatbots that help you cater to a wide audience, to chatbots that can handle concierge duties, to voice activated services and other data analysis, AI is revolutionizing the hotel industry.
With the ability to carry out human functions more efficiently, hotels can use this technology to optimize operations and to streamline the guest experience in order to boost guest retention rates and drive sales.
Author
Eva Lacalle
Eva has over a decade of international experience in marketing, communication, events and digital marketing. When she's not at work, she's probably surfing, dancing, or exploring the world.
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