These Travel Tech Execs Push Back on AI Hype for Hotels

Skift Take

These hotel tech execs all believe there are big opportunities for AI, but they also believe that marketers are promoting it in ways that don’t make sense.

Justin Dawes

Travel companies these days are full of stories touting the ways they use AI. Travel tech companies heavily market new tools, sometimes branding themselves as AI companies. 

But some in the industry think it’s mostly hype. 

The leaders of three hotel tech companies — competitors Cloudbeds, Mews, and Stayntouch — all shared their takes on how generative AI is getting some undeserved attention. 

The primary business for all three companies is their property management system, which handles operations for hotels like check-in and check-out. 

See comments below from:

• Cloudbeds CEO Adam Harris 
• Mews founder Richard Valtr
• Stayntouch CEO Jacob Messina

Too Much AI Hype: ‘There’s No Silver Bullet’

Harris of Cloudbeds believes that hotel tech companies are heavily marketing AI tools that aren’t actually as impressive or unique as they promote. 

Cloudbeds has been using AI since it started, he said, but the company hasn’t done much marketing around it. 

Cloudbeds services include AI tools like automatic translation, advertising content generation, and AI-generated drafts of responses to customer reviews, he said.

• “I don’t think that’s cool. That’s commodity,” Harris said, referring to the company’s existing AI tools. “These are mission-critical functionalities that hoteliers are doing every single day, and we’re just automating a step using AI. But is that the Holy Grail? No. I’m not downplaying our tech … I think we need to get past the cool magic. These are just very simple experiences.”
• “I think what you’re going to see over the next three years is a lot of hype with AI but not a lot of substance. You’ll get a little bit of coolness, which is great — we need that. But what [the industry is] really trying to look for is this Holy Grail. There’s no Holy Grail. There’s no silver bullet. We have labor shortages in this industry. We don’t have a solution for immigration. We’ve got privacy laws that are coming up the Yin Yang, and then we have new security laws that are going in place. AI doesn’t fix that.” 
• “Are we playing with ways that we can bring the magic front-and-center to hoteliers? 100% We have a really good team that is playing with new forms of AI. I’m very, very excited about some of the things that we’re doing. We have a team that is focused just on cracking what will the future operator look like, and how will tech enhance that operator.”

(Read about Harris’s stance that acquisitions are not a growth engine for Cloudbeds.)

Not Much AI Innovation 

Mews recently announced some AI-powered products. They include an upgraded search capability attached to the tech so that hotel staff can ask questions in everyday language, such as, “How many check-ins did I have yesterday?” Soon, the tool will be able to make suggestions — like recognizing a VIP and offering an upgrade — based on past stays paired with real-time data. 

Valtr of Mews has been surprised at the lack of announcements in general from hotel tech companies, especially during the major industry convention, HITEC, that took place last month. (There were some, however, like products from the hospitality arms of Amadeus and Sabre.)

• “What’s annoying is how little everyone’s actually done in terms of actual interesting innovations. We just launched [our] first AI products at Unfold (the annual Mews tech conference); we’re now rolling it out. And we were so mad about it because we were like, ‘We’re going to be so late with this.’ It just feels like nobody’s doing anything, and it just feels very strange.”
• “This is an industry where generative AI would really work. [Property management systems] are basically the main data systems of record.”

(Read about Valtr’s approach to growing Mews via acquistion.)

Where AI Is Most Useful

Stayntouch has its first AI hackathon coming up, where software developers will focus on ways to automate internal tasks. The company is more focused on internal uses, like a new tool to help customer service staff access resources more quickly, Messina said.

• “We get asked a lot about how we’re using AI, and people are looking for a lot of guest-facing interactions for it. We’ve decided to take a little bit of a different approach instead of just dropping dot-AI at the end of each of our product names, like a lot of folks are doing.”
• “I think a lot of people think of AI as it’s going to create that next innovation. I actually would disagree in large part. There are so many repetitive tasks that our employees do, so if I can automate 20% of those with AI, then I can have those people focus on creating innovations based on their software hospitality background — and that’s where I think the real innovations will come.”

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.