Generative AI May Revolutionize Hotel Booking and Distribution

26.09.2024 - 20:50 / skift.com / Sean Oneill / Chris Hemmeter

Hotel companies are continuing to game out how the innovations and disruptions brought about by generative AI will impact them. But it’s still early days.

“There’s been a lot of hype,” said Jess Petitt, SVP of commercial strategy, insights, and analytics at Hilton.

“The number of hotel bookings that are actually generated using Generative AI is infinitesimally small,” Petitt said. “But in the next five years, the [technology] will make a huge impact.”

Here are several themes we heard from Petitt and others who spoke on-stage at the Destination AI summit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

Hotel executives frequently asked how device makers like Apple, Amazon (with its Alexa products), and Samsung might weave generative AI into their operating systems.

In one vision of the future, tech giants like Apple will apply generative AI to all of a person’s personal data on their phones. Gen AI will allow them to make more relevant travel recommendations than other companies.

“In a demo at the Google I/O conference this summer, a woman said, ‘I want to go to Chicago for four days with my husband and two kids,'” noted George Roukas, president of the consulting firm Gaipan.

“Boom! Out came not a static itinerary but a fully dynamic itinerary,” he said. “So when she wanted to wake up later on the second day, she could make that change, and the agent intelligently reflowed the itinerary because it knew how long it will take to get from here to there.”

Gen AI may be embedded in interfaces like your phone or voice-powered computers in your kitchen or car. Travelers may by default enjoy Gen AI’s knowledge of their history and inferences about their preferences — information suppliers like Marriott and online travel agencies like Expedia won’t have as ready access.

“What if it’s not pay-to-play?” asked Cindy Estis Green, co-founder and CEO of Kalibri Labs. “What if it’s happening in the background as this new form of super SEO? If you’re a supplier, how do you get to the consumer?”

Some experts envision a future in which online travel agencies and hotel companies won’t be able to compete with what tech players know about customers, given that your phone may know more about you than they do.

“If an AI agent has a personalization capability, it should ultimately take the traveler to the best place to book a hotel that the user wants to actually sleep in rather than to another place that’s going to search for the best deal,” said Chris Hemmeter, managing director at Thayer Ventures. “So does it ultimately serve a direct channel better?”

“In the short run, the OTAs [online travel agencies] are going to harvest customers because they have thousands of engineers and a head start in investing in AI,” Hemmeter said. “Their