How AI Transforms Hotel Operations

AI Agents Are Booking Hotels. Is Your Direct Channel Ready to Compete? OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent Mode has transformed hotel bookings. AI is no longer just suggesting options. It now books directly on behalf of travelers. Instead of comparing hotels across websites, guests simply ask ChatGPT for what they want, and the AI searches, selects, and completes the reservation, often through OTAs. If your hotel content isn’t structured in a way AI systems can read and trust, your brand is effectively invisible. Traditional SEO tactics focused on human search behavior are no longer enough. Hotels must shift to Answer Engine Optimization, using structured data and clear content that AI agents can easily process. Most hotel teams are not ready for this shift and may already be missing bookings without realizing it. 📢 THE PIVOT FOR HOTEL COMMERCIAL TEAMS: Hotel commercial teams need to rethink their entire approach. This is not about improving your Google rank. It is about making your hotel visible to AI agents that now complete bookings for your guests. ⚠️ The rules of the direct channel have changed. Your content needs to be structured for AI discoverability. Your team needs to understand how AI agents make decisions. Without that, you will be bypassed without even knowing it. The direct channel is at risk unless your teams become AI-literate and start building content for machines as well as humans. FIVE ACTION STEPS FOR HOTEL TEAMS: 1️⃣ Audit and Optimize Structured Data Review your website and booking platform to ensure correct schema markup is in place. AI agents rely on machine-readable data to process your rates, amenities, and availability. 2️⃣ Implement Answer Engine Optimization Move beyond traditional SEO. Focus your content on clear, factual, structured property details across all platforms where AI agents can find them. 3️⃣ Upskill Your Team on AI Literacy Train your marketing, revenue, and sales teams on how AI agents function. AI is now a participant in the booking process. Your teams need to understand how to influence its choices. 4️⃣ Track AI Visibility and Recommendations Start measuring how often your hotel is seen or selected by AI systems like ChatGPT. Visibility is now invisible. Without tracking, you won’t know what you are losing. 5️⃣ Strengthen Direct Channel AI Readiness Ensure your website, booking engine, and voice assistants are optimized to serve both human guests and AI agents. Using AI Voice Agents can help capture direct bookings that might otherwise be lost. If your team needs help optimizing your direct channel, developing AI skills, or driving immediate revenue, reach out. Whether it’s training your team, creating structured content, or helping you track AI-driven visibility, I can support you. Consider me a gig member of your team, ready to help you drive results.

Recently, Hospitality Net asked their Digital Marketing in Hospitality panel how hotels could use AI to shift bookings from OTAs to their direct channels. You might find this answer interesting: In the near term, the biggest opportunities AI provides for driving direct revenue revolve around creating richer, more personalized experiences at each stage of the guest journey. Hotel marketers can use AI to better segment potential guests based on behaviors and deliver content and offers — at scale — that match those segments’ intent. Increasingly, you can let the AI select and orchestrate campaign messages, images, and offers that align with the needs of potential guests, and drive conversion. Similarly, these tools can provide intelligent rate displays and offer attractive upsell opportunities to guests to improve the revenue you achieve during each stay. Real-time guest service during the booking process, including chat, can help improve that experience and increase conversion rate.  Of course, the guest journey doesn’t end at time of booking. Again, savvy hotel commercial teams are beginning to put AI to work to upsell and cross-sell on-property experiences during the pre-arrival and on-property stages of the guest journey to drive greater share of wallet. And, of course, intelligent, automated post-stay campaigns are beginning to produce results in driving repeat bookings from past guests.  In the longer term, we’ve not yet seen how universal access to AI assistants will shape guest behavior. These tools are likely to shift the way guests interact with information and experiences every bit as much as the internet, mobile, and social media have. We should expect to see new marketing and distribution channels that make it easy for us to reach guests directly — and new gatekeepers who seek to insert themselves into that process. Every silver lining comes wrapped in its own cloud.  Regardless, these benefits come with a cost. Hoteliers must take a serious look at their existing tech stack and team skills to ensure they’re ready to put these tools to work. Take a look at the partners you work with. Do they make it easy to connect with new sales and marketing partners? Do they have a well-articulated vision for how they’ll incorporate AI into their products? Have they begun to deliver on that vision? If so, you’re in great shape. If not, it may be time to start looking at alternatives.  And, finally, don’t ignore your people. Does your team have the skills, the resources, and the vision needed to adapt to a changing customer and technology landscape? You will want to give them the support they need to quickly adjust as guest behaviors — and those of your competitors — evolve. The hoteliers who are able to learn the fastest, and put those learnings to use, are the ones most likely to succeed at driving more direct business as AI becomes more common. And there’s nothing artificial about that. #AI #hospitalitymarketing

This time, from 𝗥𝗙𝗣 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗣𝗔𝗥 📈 HITEC Indianapolis 2025 highlighted the shift in hotel tech – 𝙖𝙬𝙖𝙮 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙛𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙝𝙮 𝙙𝙚𝙢𝙤𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙤𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙨𝙪𝙗𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚. Why? 🔺𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 → are no longer content to wait hours to respond to leads → expect to send proposals in minutes, with real-time pricing and availability built in. 🔺𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 → are now tapping into real-time guest profiles to deliver personalized outreach that drives direct bookings, even during low-demand periods. 🔺𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘀 → are trading in spreadsheets and guesswork for AI, automation, and real-time insights. ⭐ The most impressive hotel 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁, and 𝗠𝗜𝗖𝗘 & 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 innovations? Blended so seamlessly into daily operations, you almost forgot they were there. 👉 Cloudbeds 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 boosts direct bookings with less manual work by automating email campaigns using live guest data. 👉 IDeaS Revenue Solutions 𝗜𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗦 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 helps hotels drive more revenue from targeted campaigns. 👉 Duetto 𝗚𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 simplifies rate updates and helps hotel teams grow smarter across portfolios. 👉 𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗯𝘆 Mews 𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 gives hotels a new revenue stream by capturing fees from international payments - fees that used to go to the bank. 👉 MeetingPackage 𝗔𝗜 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗮𝗹 𝗙𝗹𝗼𝘄 speeds up RFP replies from hours to minutes, saving time and helping hotels win more business. 👉 Agilysys 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸™ 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗦.𝗣.𝗘.𝗡.𝗗. 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 lets guests book online. No calls or back-and-forth required. 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙙 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙪𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙡𝙚 𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚: https://t2m.io/4X84MgC Or 𝙨𝙬𝙞𝙥𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙬 for more standout tools across hotel marketing, revenue management, and MICE & Sales, including: 🔹 Akia Agents 🔹 FirstView FirstVisit 🔹 TakeUp Why This Rate 🔹 Smart Host Multi Property 🔹 Thynk.Cloud AI Email Copilot 🔹 Event Temple Smart Proposals 🔹 FLYR Hospitality AI Summaries 🔹 Tripleseat Auto-Generated Event Forecasting 🔹 RoomPriceGenie Group Displacement Calculator 🔹 Triptease Cross-channel Campaign Builder with Date Boost 🔹 Revenue Analytics, Inc. AI Report Generator #HITEC2025 #HotelTech #HotelMarketing #RevenueManagement #SalesAndMeetings

We’re not just #applying AI to hospitality. We’re #engineering it for hospitality. Cloudbeds is building the only purpose-built AI foundation model for hospitality forecasting—and it’s delivering real business results. Our work with Snowflake ML wasn’t just about scale. It was about rewriting the rules of forecasting: Partitioned model training cut iteration time from 12 hours to 30 minutes Real-time pipelines ingest 4B+ signals/hour Feature store and causal AI drive insights across all market segments The result? A unified intelligence layer—Cloudbeds Intelligence—that powers occupancy and revenue forecasting with 95% accuracy and is transforming how hoteliers operate globally. 📖 Full breakdown of our MLOps pipeline, experimentation stack, and real-world impact penned by our very own machine learning visionary Amit Popat : https://lnkd.in/gSzeJ3px #AI #HospitalityTech #Forecasting #MLops #Cloudbeds #Snowflake #CausalAI #FeatureEngineering #HotelTech