Redefining Hotel Search for Travel’s Experiential Era

Skift Take

The newest generation of AI technology is unshackling the hospitality industry from traditional search and booking. Anna Jaffe, CEO at Mobi.ai, unpacks her predictions for search’s future and how hotels can better understand travelers’ needs through natural language interfaces and innovative search capabilities.

Mobi Systems, Inc

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Travel search and booking has long been a four-box checklist for the hospitality industry: destination, dates, number of people, and budget. The traveler fills out the basics of a trip, and the supplier — a hotel, an airline, a travel agency — returns what can be pages of options. Anna Jaffe, CEO of Mobi.ai, which supports hospitality businesses with technology across their online touchpoints, says that the standard approach to search leads to missed revenue.

In this conversation, Jaffe discusses how AI is changing the search and booking equation for travelers looking for a hotel stay tailored to their individual needs and hospitality providers ready to provide these next-level experiences.

SkiftX: When we think about AI as an approach to search and bookings in the hospitality industry, what is AI changing right now from Mobi’s point of view?

Anna Jaffe: If you take the four boxes in travel and replace them with AI tools, then the approach for travel is radically different from the approach for search in almost every other context. 

Much of the AI we experience today has been built for e-commerce or gaming. It has yet to be applied to the dynamic ‘world’ search needed for travel. The hotel knows about its hotels — it often doesn’t know about the world. The airline knows about its planes — it doesn’t know about the world. We’ve never had a global search product for hotels before. And so that’s what Intent Driven Search is opening up. 

SkiftX: How does Intent Driven Search differ from traditional search methods?

Anna Jaffe: We use our Intent Driven Search language model to understand how people express who they are and what they want. Then, we use a collaborative AI set of tools and techniques to map and understand the world and what is true about inventory, climate, and even a performance or a sporting event. For example, who is actually going to be on that team for that game on those dates when you are traveling somewhere? What is the weather forecast for the time the game is scheduled?

You can ask much more open-ended questions with Intent Driven Search. For example, you can say, ‘I want to stay at a five-star hotel for 50,000 points a night,’ or ‘I want to find a destination that I can fly nonstop to, has amazing onsite Michelin dining, and a variety of street food markets where I can eat lunch.’ 

SkiftX: How does this approach cater to different types of travelers, especially those looking for unique experiences?

Jaffe: One of the things that’s true today is you have communities of people who deeply love their thing. It doesn’t matter if their thing is sports, rockhounding, animal bucket lists, or hidden away places where you can eat foods only found in that one town — there is data on the internet generated over time by each of these groups of people. 

We’ve spent the last five or six years stitching all that information together to understand what is good and bad about a restaurant, what is good and bad about a beach, and what is good and bad about a hotel. It takes a level of mapping the world you don’t get from Expedia or TripAdvisor and the specificity about place and time you can’t get from an LLM. Google probably has this information, but they don’t make it available. 

We had to build both the search capability and the content behind the search to augment whatever information the supplier owns. If you’re going to answer personal questions that people have, then you must have deep, deep knowledge about everything that exists in a travel context. 

SkiftX: How do you expect AI tools like Intent Driven Search to influence hotel revenue?

Jaffe: There are three pieces. The first is defensive: People are learning to ask hotels for what they want and expect the hotel to find the right property for them based on what they want to do. If you can’t, they will move on to another hotel. 

The second is when someone gives you a single destination, a single set of dates, and a single set of people showing up. If they ask for one thing, show them a normal-priced option, a medium-priced one, and the aspirational version. If they just said they want a $200 room, and you don’t know they can spend $400, you’re leaving all that extra money on the table if you don’t show them the range of options and rely only on the one thing they’ve queried.

Finally, travelers tend to spend about one-third of their trip budget on the hotel stay and two-thirds on the other travel elements. Hotels have a real opportunity to own those ancillary elements they could deliver on-property or in-market. For example, if you know your guest wants a massage and your property has a great spa, you have the opportunity to grab that booking on-property. If not, you could connect them to a spa you’ve partnered with and collect a commission. Intent Driven Search puts all these pieces together in the process of a single search.

SkiftX: What’s an example of how Intent Driven Search has transformed the outcome and created conversions for one of Mobi’s partners?

Jaffe: We’ve been working with a well-known travel group to implement Intent Driven Search. They have their own inventory of hotels, flights, and excursions—pretty much all of the elements of the trip. What makes them special is that they have people on the ground who are there to help their travelers. 

Intent-driven Search will first play the role of concierge and then pass that information to the person in the lobby helping the guest. Now, they know why the guest has come to the destination, say, to visit old churches or that you’re looking for an excellent massage to alleviate your neck pain. It will make for a better, more personalized experience for their guests. 

SkiftX: What does Intent Driven Search mean for the future of global search in travel and hospitality?

Jaffe: I think the industry will move away from the typical three or four boxes. You’ll still have traditional search, but every site will have a toggle where you can switch between a natural language search — where a traveler can ask for precisely what experiences they want out of their trip at any geographic scale — and a traditional search where, say, two travelers specifically want to visit New York City and arrive and depart on defined dates. Natural language search unlocks experiential search and sets up a level of hospitality that will differentiate brands, and I’m excited about that. 

The digital tools will also collaborate with the guest and the on-property teams. We’re finally getting to a place where digital tools can enable travelers to express who they are and ask for what they want. Brands can now better understand their customers and hand this information to on-the-ground human teams. The technology will collaborate with their on-property people, improving the experience for everyone. 

For more information about Mobi.ai and Intent Driven Search, click here.

This content was created collaboratively by Mobi and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.