Recommendation engines, that personalise offers to guests, have been around for quite some time with the primary aim to make tailored offerings and improve the chance of an instant upsell. The goal of these engines has traditionally been to generate short term additional revenue.
Hyper personalisation, on the other hand, intends to create customer delight and build loyalty over time, which eventually will result in long-term, sustainable repeat business. Generative and Agentic AI are unlocking new opportunities to make real hyper personalisation a reality. Here is how.
Hyper personalisation in action
Not all travellers are the same. For a business traveller, a hotel room could be a home away from home while a family on leisure may be looking for a unique local experience. Generative AI can anticipate what guests are likely to want and Agentic AI can help create this unique experience. It can be as simple as ensuring that the room is fit for the purpose of the guest’s stay and adjust features like amenities, the ambiance or temperature setting accordingly. For return guests, the room setup can be returned automatically to its previous settings based on their preferences.
Generative AI can also help ensure that when food is ordered, via any channel, the guest is presented with their preferred selection, or a suggested bundle of food items as a unique offer. The same counts for in-room entertainment where the guest’s preferred TV channels can be shown or highlighted at the top of the list.
In addition, Generative AI can eliminate the drudgery of planning excursions by booking transportation, purchasing tickets and creating a schedule tailored to the guest’s preferences, all done with a voice command on the hotel’s mobile app.
A guest’s interaction with the hotel starts well before they arrive. A personalised welcome video from the hotel manager creates a “looking forward to” sentiment with the guest, which is a strong driver of loyalty.
Generative and Agentic AI
The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 ushered in the age of Generative AI; artificial intelligence that can create its own content by learning from existing text, images, videos or audio files. Over the past years, more Gen AI has become available to the public and the technology has become smarter.
The latest AI development is Agentic AI or simply Agents. Where Gen AI generates an answer based on a question asked by the user, Agentic AI can operate on its own, make decisions and automate processes. For example, Gen AI would be able to create a trip itinerary and Agentic AI can take this one step further and book the entire trip; make calendar entries, book restaurants and inform the babysitter.
Getting started with Generative AI
The Generative AI space is evolving very rapidly; new models and improvements as well as additional capabilities are announced regularly with both proprietary and open-source models available.
Vendors of proprietary models offer APIs (open interfaces) and SDKs (development kits) that make it easy to get started quickly. They do, however, require data to be sent over the cloud to the vendor’s data center, which is a privacy and confidentiality consideration.
Open-source models make it possible to deploy Generative AI within a company’s environment but requires in-house expertise that may slow down progress. Open-source models such as the Llama series of models from Meta compare very well with proprietary models offered by OpenAI and Google and are fully open source.
In hospitality there are vendors who offer out-of-the-box functionality that can help unlock some of the power provided by AI straight away.
Whatever you choose, open source, proprietary or out-of-the-box applications, Generative and Agentic AI will be key to create real hyper personalisation in hotels.
Authored by Manohar Mulchandani
Head of Technology, Hudini
Find out more at www.hudini.io
