LAS VEGAS — On the second day of its 70th annual convention held at Mandalay Bay, Choice Hotels International announced a new set of AI-powered tech platforms: Choice Hotels Business Direct, EasyBid, CHARLIE and RAISE. The new platforms are meant to build on the company’s existing relationships with Amazon Web Services and Salesforce to utilize AgentCore and AgentForce.
During a roundtable on the trade show floor, Choice President and CEO Patrick Pacious said that the company has been using AI for more than a decade, although the technology has gone by other names in the past. This year, he said, is the year the company wants to get the “tools in the hands of the franchisees.”
Echoing Pacious’ comments from the convention's opening general session, Chief Commercial Officer Joshua Sloser said the company is focusing on turning guest demand into revenue. The tech investments are part of that initiative. “We're doing a lot to both build tools that help us to help our franchisees to be more effective at driving their revenue engine, and we're also looking at partnerships that help us to lean into where the customer is going in the future,” he said.
CHARLIE
CHARLIE is an AI-powered virtual “teammate” designed to support hotel teams through Choice Hotels’ core operating platforms. CHARLIE acts as a 24/7 digital coach that responds to hotel staff needs, surfaces insights and bolsters brand standards, reducing the time staff spend getting up to speed at the start of each shift and searching for information. As the platform continues to evolve, the company expects to expand its ability to help execute routine tasks.
Demonstrating the technology on the trade show floor, Tony Pallas, chief technology and commercial officer, SkyTouch at Choice, said that users will be able to ask questions in natural language—for example, “How many rooms are offline today?” or “How do I add a purchase to a folio?” and get quick responses and guidance. “It takes a couple of days to learn how to use a property-management system,” he said, and estimated that most staff members at a property will be able to learn the system in two days.
At the same time, Pallas acknowledged that AI can make mistakes, and pointed to a notice at the bottom of the CHARLIE screen reminding users that they are “responsible for independently reviewing and verifying all AI-generated content” before relying or acting on it. “It's very important to use AI responsibly,” he said. “You can't turn your hotel over to AI, and we would never advocate for that. We need them to still verify, and the humans are still in control.”
Choice Hotels EasyBid and EasyBid Plus
EasyBid is an AI-enhanced tool to help secure group requests for proposals. The tool helps hotels manage and monitor group RFP opportunities in one place and submit faster, more effective responses. EasyBid Plus will let Choice Hotels respond to RFPs directly on behalf of owners while maintaining oversight and control at no additional cost. This option is designed to save time and boost win rates by targeting high-quality group leads, which will make it valuable for properties without dedicated sales teams or during periods of high RFP volume.
When an RFP arrives, the AI can automatically fill out some fields before a team member even looks at the form, Vincent Malling, senior director of global sales strategy, insights and performance, said on the show floor. (Users can also change fields if they don’t believe the AI got the answers right, he added.) Ultimately, the system may soon be able to respond to RFPs automatically, without team members from the property ever seeing the request itself—useful when requests come in over a weekend when sales teams are not on site, Malling said. “Even when you don't have staff, the response time goes to effectively zero hours.”
The platform will let sales teams at individual hotels see RFPs from Cvent, Event Connect and from Choice’s own website, and will recommend pricing based on rates available on multiple channels. It will also show how team members are doing in terms of response times and conversion rates.
Choice Hotels Business Direct
Launching next week, Choice Hotels Business Direct is a self-service digital booking platform that will help representatives of small and medium-sized businesses book stays directly on ChoiceHotels.com. The platform will help SMBs create travel policies, give travel managers greater visibility into travel behavior and provide travelers and their companies with benefits and rewards. According to the company, this will help hotels capture more midweek demand.
“EasyBid is all for franchisees,” Malling said. Business Direct, in turn, is for guests and agents specializing in corporate travel. The system works with a company’s travel policies, removing rooms that are beyond a pre-set budget from the list of options and highlighting hotels that meet specific needs. The system also “gamifies” bookings to offer increased discounts for businesses that book more nights, Malling said.
RAISE
Choice is set to launch RAISE, a rate-management tool designed to streamline how owners manage pricing, rates and inventory. The platform aims to simplify complex workflows, reduce manual effort and help owners stay competitive as market conditions shift by using AI to source the right information at the right time.
AgentCore and AgentForce
AgentCore provides a foundation for intelligent agents, enabling Choice Hotels to scale agentic capabilities across teams while supporting governance and enterprise requirements. AgentForce supports the building and deployment of AI agents as teammates across sales, service, marketing, commerce and internal operations that can help automate, accelerate and scale workflows.
In a statement announcing the launches, Anna Scozzafava, chief data, AI and technology officer, said that AgentCore and AgentForce help Choice Hotels “move beyond isolated AI use cases to an integrated, enterprise-wide approach.” This will help support the company’s growth in the “emerging world of agentic commerce, where AI agents will increasingly research, compare and book travel on behalf of consumers.”
On the trade-show floor, Scozzafava said the team is “super optimistic” about the company’s future. “We're investing pretty strategically in all of our AI power tools … to make sure that we are truly providing meaningful value to our owners.”