Artificial Intelligence’s ever expanding role in the hospitality industry and the zeitgeist of predictive analytics continue to pique interest, though it isn’t without controversy. Some embrace its capabilities to reduce operations costs, improve profitability, predict guest preferences, improve sustainability practices, and streamline day-to-day maintenance. Others express concern that progress may be made at the expense of people. This was addressed at The Hospitality Show 2025 in Denver last week during the panel, AI Now: What’s Actually Moving the Needle in Hotels.
Nevertheless, AI’s adoption is still pushing forward, and some hospitality professionals will affirm there are occasions when AI empowers management and staff and others when it misses the mark. Moderator Pavan Kapur, past chief commercial officer at Caesars Entertainment, steered the session by allowing the three participants to elaborate on their successes and humbling fails of AI and lessons learned from their respective hotels’ implementation of AI technology.
At one point, Kapur asked Omar Bouchaar, general manager and executive hospitality consultant, Wyndham Garden, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Michelle Sharma, Refinery Hotel Group’s commercial director; and Melissa Stricker, general manager of Fairfield by Marriott in Charleston, W.V. about the AI trends they were most excited or skeptical about. He was then moved to put his thoughts on the pros and cons of AI into a short statement.
“I think AI is going to change the way loyalty programs exist,” he said. “Rather than just earning points and achieving tiers, AI is going to personalize (individual) loyalty program for everyone. I think we're going to soon see the end of just earning points in tiers, and AI will power a lot of that. It is something where you can upload thousands of contracts, and can summarize information in two minutes rather than do six months of analysis to summarize a whole year of work. It’s a great thing, but data privacy needs to be protected, and the way we're using it needs to be learned properly by (management and staff).”
Given that each panelist came from different hotel categories and tiers of management, opinions about best practices varied. Yet there was a consensus that AI technology provides useful tools once operators and management use trial, error, and an open mind to figure out what facets of it make the most sense for their differing properties and guests.
Plugging in, but not ‘Plug and Play’
Looking at Wyndham Brand Hotel and Resorts as a whole, Bouchaar clarified AI technologies were used in different features of operations, from guest experience and engagement to revenue, financials, and maintenance concerns. Operators under his umbrella could implement AI technologies through a Wyndham Connect Plus platform for a variety of purposes, including running the operation, managing revenue, and delivering a profitable net revenue to ownership, operators, or the overall brand.
“With Wyndham Connect Plus, we have a messaging 24/7 with the guest and the live voice of an AI agent helping them plan travel, pay bills, and book with ease as doing things with ease is a big part of our culture,” Bouchaar said, noting hotel management and operators can miss out on better profit if they don’t reconcile these capabilities and options, especially with anything concerning profits and room rates. “For instance, we used to use three to four days to five days to reconcile invoices between our property management systems and online travel agency systems. On the revenue side, we have a Q&I [query and insights] system that optimizes the rate, changes the rate based on trends, weather, and last flight cancellations every. With this, you don't lose opportunity by yielding a high ADR (a performance indicator representing the average revenue earned per occupied room over a set period), or capturing certain shares from your compset (competing hotels targeting the demographics)."
When setting up or upgrading AI, however, he stresses that it is important to remember the technology powers machines rather than people, and the appropriate people should always be in the mix. When training employees, he recommends reminding them that information put into a system must be accurate and input with intention as machines will react based on how they are programed.
“It's not just about how much more top line or ancillary revenue you're bringing on the table,” he said. “It's also about what your are saving in your labor and the other expenses. When you reconcile three, four or five days of work, and (processing accurately imputed information) in two seconds, that helps you save and deliver profitability to the ownership.”
As the hotels in Sharma’s portfolio operate independently, she stresses the approach to deploying AI solutions should be handled judiciously as maintaining a human touch is something targeted guests will value. However, when they are deployed, it is also important that they are focused on efficiencies that enable better communication between workers and guests.
“We just activated AI agents in the call center (that) are filtering the first two minutes of the calls to gather more information about guests’ needs and be more specific on where to deploy calls (with the information gathered),” she said. “We also activated a guest messaging solution, powered by AI, that is helping our office operations be more efficient, freeing up their time to be at the front desk and have more guest-facing conversations. We want to make sure our team is fully optimizing solutions and training others on the team to take full advantage of what our AI solutions can accomplish.”
From a commercial perspective, Sharma believes AI not only has the potential to improve ROI, but also NOI once operating expenses are accounted for.
While Stricker concentrates on one property, she is well versed on the fact that the decision makers for Marriott properties across the board take, “all kinds of different avenues to make sure that we are using AI to help our guests and ensure things are going well during their stays.” She insists AI is not replacing operations and management systems already in place, but improving upon them. She cites examples of AI being applied to temperature control and guest sentiment analysis to enhance the guest experience while saving time on certain tasks.
“AI helps us save a little time to find information we need to make a guest stay better, but do it in a way that still provides that human touch,” she said. “We use a program called Telkinet, which goes into the rooms and allows us to control the temperature. We've had it for quite a while, but now we are starting to use it with AI. This reflects my point that a lot of programs and products that we have are still in place. But with AI, we're starting to see those upgraded abilities to monitor temperatures. The guests can select their temperature control, and system speaks with our PMS system. It know when people are in the room or when people have been checked in. They ‘learn’ about the guests, especially our longer-term guests’ temperature preferences. Energy cost savings is a main way we've been able to really monitor that.”
Handle With Care
After having worked with her company’s revenue management system (RMS) for the last 10 years, Sharma found that AI made it easier to track rates histories for certain times of the year to justify why a pricing change is or is not a good idea, especially as a market fluctuation or a certain holiday overlapping with “typical” week or weekend days can affect demand. She added that keeping up with this is an ongoing learning process.
While maintaining the “human touch” is important for staff and guest relations, humans also need to monitor the data AI technologies are acting upon, according to Bouchaar who points out it is important to be careful in how AI is used, especially when a data breach can spark liability.
“Make sure you communicate with those responsible for the system in case it gets breached,” he said, recalling some of his experiences as a consumer when things went wrong with his own sensitive data. “Because the minute you hook up a machine to your PMS system, you may be giving) to all guest information and other sensitive information. It has to be protected through a third party and through your brand. Some information has to be looked at by a legal team and expert on cybersecurity. It's the way you teach the machine and the way the machine behaves that will give you a result. It’s a reminder as my 26 years in the hotel industry that we need that human touch regardless. AI may be a great thing, but the human touch is critical when being in contact with and engaging the guests, to engage with the guests.”
Stricker, meanwhile, recalls an instance when AI caused things to go awry in its reputation management. “We kind of went a little overboard, thinking, ‘We can get all this assistance with AI for customer reviews, information and everything else.’ Then we started noticing that we were losing that human touch that we talk about as one of our core values. We thought we could enter this information into the system, even with tricky customer reviews that come up. However, there still has to be a person who will sit, look, and really focus in on what needs to be said when addressing customer concerns.”
Even with ongoing pressure to stay caught up with the ever-changing capabilities of AI, Stricker believes it will continue to prove revolutionary in the hospitality. But to do that, it is important to keep learning about it, be well versed on how to use it, and know how to protect the hotel’s data and the guests’ and employees’ personal information before and during AI’s implementation.
“I'm most excited about how (AI will be) able to help improve our back-of-the-house activities like inventory, scheduling, and other areas,” she said. “While some programs already exist at Marriott, I think that starting small and building AI up into those things will be very exciting in the future. Owners are maybe a little hesitant to spend that extra money (to learn about and implement) certain systems, but I think that our brands have done a wonderful job in bringing in AI to programs that are going to help us in the future with inventory, scheduling, and back-of-the-house stuff that allow our teams to spend time with the guests and other team members .”