Will AI Cut Hotel Jobs?

It was nice to see many of you this week at the Destination AI event in Washington, D.C., and last week at Skift Global Forum in New York.

What stood out: how little people talked about AI displacing workers, despite much-publicized Anthropic and OpenAI forecasts of job losses across industries.

Sloan Dean, former CEO of Remington Hospitality and now CEO of AI Hospitality Group, said at Destination AI that the industry hesitates to discuss automating or repurposing jobs. "We don't want to have the real conversation," he said.

At Skift Global Forum, hotel leaders who raised the topic mostly talked about repurposing labor.

Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta allowed for "a little bit of reduction" in staff over time but said limited-service hotels already run lean. 

"You're never taking all the people out," he said. "In the end, we're a business of people serving people."

Accor CEO Sébastien Bazin went the furthest: "There is a third of the workforce in our network who will be impacted by it and displaced by it." He's already discussing with unions how retraining could create new jobs. His philosophy: "Automate the ordinary, humanize the extraordinary."

Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti used the example of phone calls to show how AI drives more business at hotels, which in turn sustains a human workforce.

“About 25% of calls to hotels in general usually get dropped,” he said, out of roughly 4,000 calls a year at a typical Wyndham property. A tool Wyndham built on Salesforce’s AI-powered voice software now answers every call at participating hotels. It can modify a reservation, look up loyalty points, or answer questions about pool hours. 

Ballotti said only about 15% of guests ask to transfer to a human, and calls are resulting in a higher rate of bookings. He also supports educational programs pitching hotel careers to young people, arguing that most of those careers will still be there.

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