Skift put tech leaders from Marriott, Hilton, and IHG on stage in New York on Wednesday to explore how AI will impact the operations and the future of hotel booking.
The tells were in their qualifiers. The hotel industry is still in an experimental stage. Here are some of the themes I heard:
Helping travelers brainstorm trip ideas. All three hotel groups are racing to retire the rigid date-and-destination search field in favor of conversational ways of helping guests dream up plans. Hilton put an AI stay planner live on Hilton.com in March, reporting "slightly" higher conversion among its users.
Using AI to go fast while keeping a human pace. When first conceived, Hilton's AI trip planner rushed users into choosing hotels. The company has since refined the interface to allow travelers to ask multiple questions to ensure they like a plan before getting to logistical questions, Michael Leidinger, VP & Chief Information Officer, told me on stage.
Watching "the meter." The skunk at the picnic is what Leidenger called "tokenomics." LLM vendors like OpenAI have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and are now leaning into monetization, so every exchange carries a variable cost. Hilton is policing token consumption, like cloud spend.
Reframing hotel operations. Marriott argued that the next phase is not about subtraction through automation, but about sitting with the revenue manager, buried in spreadsheets, and reengineering the job around them. Win employee buy-in, augment, then automate only the parts that earn trust, said Colin Coleman, SVP Enterprise Data, Analytics & AI.
Keeping control of distribution. Hotel groups face competition for consumer attention from online travel agencies, which are building their own conversational tools to guide customers to book through them instead of directly. Priceline debuted agentic AI enhancements to its conversational trip planner on Wednesday, and its chief technology officer, Sejal Amin, told me that the company sees higher conversion from people using the tool than those who don't.
Meeting the customer where they go. IHG’s head of AI and architecture, Wei Manfredi, said it aims to follow every customer segment. If some trip planning is migrating to ChatGPT, the hotel group would rather sit in that conversation than risk ChatGPT handing the guest to an OTA or a rival hotel group. So it launched a ChatGPT app on Wednesday that lets travelers search its 7,000-plus hotels, surfacing live pricing, maps, and availability, then routing them back to IHG's own site and app for booking. Marriott reiterated its plan to roll out conversational search by the end of June.
Keeping expectations "realistic." The same instinct shows up at Hilton's front desk, where a conversational agent within its HotelKey property management system could one day check in an entire group with a single command or coach the next new hire through a shift, according to Leidinger. And progress will be slow. As my colleague Adriana Lee summed up an on-stage interview with Mews Founder Richard Valtr, "AI can't sell what hotel systems can't see. Until room-level data, guest behavior, and service pricing live in one connected system, the industry's AI gains will stay stuck on the cost efficiency side of the ledger."
Send us tips and scoops. Email Luke Martin ([email protected]) and me ([email protected]).
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