Dow Jones executive Mae Cheng moderates a lively discussion with Ruslan Husry (HR Group) and Iliana Oris Valiente (Accenture), exploring how technology, particularly AI, and new travel trends are reshaping the hospitality industry.
“AI is a very important tool for us”, Husry says, because it can make the entire customer journey “much more easy”, allowing hotels to give guests “the best experience when they are starting with us.”
For that purpose, how his company is developing an AI-powered digital concierge to provide personalized services across hotel categories, from budget to upscale properties.
Iliana Oris Valiente reveals that she has digital twin that “looks like me, sounds like me and has been trained on the transcripts of every talk I’ve ever delivered.”
She connects this to hospitality by suggesting how such technology could provid “endless personalization” to every single guest, offering a “real human-to-human type of experience” instead of mere chatbots.
Oris Valiente also takes on the cliché of digital nomads. “I want you to conjure up an image”, she says. “And I bet you that what you’ve come up with is probably a 22-year-old person sitting on a beach in Bali, working from their laptop, earning $15,000 a year.”
That image is wrong, the travel industry expert says. “In fact, over 50% of folks who live this type of lifestyle are actually 30 to 39 years old, and the average income is over $100,000 USD – which completely defies how people perceive that demographic.”
Watch the video to find out why the experts agree that businesses must adapt quickly to cater to these technology-driven shifts in the hospitality industry, from offering hybrid work-friendly accommodations to creating spaces for social connection.
