AI in hospitality: Use cases, benefits, and more

The hospitality industry is all about creating meaningful, memorable experiences. With a strong customer experience (CX) strategy, hospitality businesses can satisfy their customers better and increase retention rates. However, making a lasting impression in a crowded market where customers have more choices than ever is difficult. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.

AI in hospitality helps improve CX for hotels, restaurants, travel and transportation services, and any business that feeds, hosts, or otherwise entertains customers. In this guide, we’ll break down exactly how it does so, the benefits businesses can expect from using AI, and more.

More in this guide:

• Use cases of AI in hospitality
• How AI benefits the hospitality industry
• 3 examples of AI in hospitality
• What is the future of AI in hospitality?
• Frequently asked questions
• Create a better customer service strategy with AI in hospitality

Use cases of AI in hospitality

AI isn’t just a feature that makes tools smarter—it’s a tool in itself that helps service customers in entirely new ways. These are some of the top use cases for AI in hospitality.

Responding day or night

In the hospitality industry, availability can be the difference between swaying customers to make a reservation. Businesses and customer service teams need to be accessible and accommodating.

If a customer needs to manage or cancel a reservation outside of business hours, they need a reliable and fast way to do so. Intelligent bots like AI agents can respond to customer inquiries anytime for true 24/7 support. From there, it can assist with actions like adding a person to a reservation, upgrading a room, and more.

Creating VIP profiles

Loyal customers might expect more personalized customer service than usual in return for their reliability as your top spenders. Rather than enlist a fleet of butlers or a dedicated support team to cater to VIPs, hospitality leaders can opt for an AI-driven tool to help personalize experiences effortlessly.

AI automatically flags customer profiles for VIP status once they’ve reached a certain milestone. It can use those VIP profiles to record preferences like room selection or amenity offerings to ensure each stay is convenient and comfortable.

Automating room service

No guest wants to wait around for room service—they’d like their order as fast as possible and expect the experience to be convenient. AI can automate the process of responding to room service requests.

AI quickly scans the inquiry and analyzes customer sentiment, intent, and language. Then, it responds with a personalized answer, like a list of today’s entree specials or pricing for the hotel spa. Once the customer makes a selection, automation creates and sends a ticket to the appropriate person or team.

Collecting guest feedback

Feedback and quality assurance (QA) in hospitality are what help businesses get better and better at providing top-tier customer service. Four Seasons didn’t become a titan in the hospitality industry by guessing—its people listened to guests, made accommodations, and continually innovated.

AI in QA can elevate customer feedback collection by analyzing 100 percent of customer interactions and flagging negative or subpar conversations. Then, either the AI or a human agent can intervene to address the situation, and managers can use the opportunity to coach agents or change workflows to avoid it in the future.

How AI benefits the hospitality industry

An AI customer experience benefits hospitality businesses in many different ways. Here are five of the best to expect.

Creates hyper-personalized guest experiences

AI gives hospitality businesses exponential customer service analytics capabilities to personalize experiences. It analyzes guest information, including all their past trips or transactions, and uses that information to tailor conversations for individual preferences and needs.

For example, if a guest usually orders hot tea when they check in, AI can proactively offer it during the booking process. It can also analyze sentiment in reviews or social media posts to spot areas for improvement.

Then, it can tailor future conversations accordingly, always analyzing new data to factor into that personalization.

Empowers guests to problem-solve

If you enable your guests to problem-solve on their own, you can deflect a portion of your support tickets and ensure agents have ample time to address more urgent issues. An AI knowledge base is a powerful self-service tool that takes the effort out of keeping an up-to-date resource library for guests to self-serve.

With an AI-driven knowledge base, guests can easily find what they’re looking for with a tool that surfaces accurate and relevant content on demand. It even helps hospitality businesses with content and knowledge management by flagging gaps or outdated articles. All these abilities help customers find what they need faster and can help them avoid creating a ticket in the first place.

Improves service efficiency with automation

Successful hospitality businesses function like well-oiled machines, orchestrating fast and efficient service while making it look easy. AI automation easily takes over routine and repetitive tasks, allowing human support teams to focus on value-adding interactions and improving efficiency.

Take check-in and check-out, for example. Customers don’t want to wait in lines for either—with AI, they can skip the front desk altogether. AI tools can automate the process entirely or allow customers to lengthen their stay, request a late check-out, and more.

Helps to continuously improve service

Solving problems quickly helps limit customer frustration and avoid churn. Solving them proactively helps avoid future problems altogether, ensuring high customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels. AI is a powerful tool for companies that want to prioritize customer service QA and improvement. It can actively analyze every customer interaction to detect issues or potential areas of concern and then flag those issues for staff to intervene.

When a human agent is in the middle of a customer conversation, AI can analyze sentiment and provide suggestions to respond appropriately. This helps conversations flow smoothly and improves resolution rates so guests can focus on their stay. And if the conversation results in a negative customer reaction or response, AI can flag it so that customer service leaders can use it as a coaching opportunity.

3 examples of AI in hospitality

The benefits of AI in hospitality aren’t hypothetical. Companies are actively leveraging AI to improve customer experiences in lodging, travel, and more. Let’s take a look at three examples of hospitality companies using AI.

Serko Limited improves booking and communication efficiency

Global travel technology provider Serko Limited handles over 4 million bookings annually via its online platform. With around 350 employees, the company needed a tool to scale support operations with limited resources.

With so many customer tickets, Serko Limited now uses AI to condense and summarize lengthy, complex tickets or ones with lots of back-and-forth communication. And if customers speak a different language than an agent, those tickets are translated for accurate service.

DiscoverCars saves agents time and handles more requests

DiscoverCars helps connect customers with rental cars. It needed a trusted solution to help manage seasonal travel spikes, so it turned to generative AI via the help of AI agents to meet those support needs. This AI technology creates new content from existing data—it gives DiscoverCars’s agents more resources to solve customer requests.

With customers worldwide, DiscoverCars doesn’t have to worry about translation with generative AI’s multilingual customer support. After implementing AI, DiscoverCars saw a five-point increase in its CSAT score.

Eurail sees drastic improvements in response and resolution time

Travel company Eurail helps train-bound tourists and residents on their voyages between 33 European countries. It saw a massive 25 percent increase in sales in 2023 and needed a partner to help it handle the customer influx without losing service quality.

Now, AI agents engage with customers, read requests, and flag terms for agent attention. Meanwhile, automation helps them replace repetitive administrative tasks and reduce errors in tedious tasks like data entry. This led to 95 percent faster first response rates and 85 percent faster full response times.

What is the future of AI in hospitality?

The future of the hospitality industry will involve even faster, more personalized customer interactions, all thanks to CX-focused AI. We’re not far away from a world where 100 percent of customer interactions involve AI—and according to the Zendesk AI-powered CX Report 2024, AI will soon be able to resolve 80 percent of those without a human agent’s involvement. Here are a few predictions for what’s next from AI in hospitality:

• Proactivity: Using data and insights crawled from previous interactions and customer preferences, AI will be able to proactively predict and tailor unique guest experiences like room amenities, dining options, and local recommendations.
• Efficiency: AI will continue to improve hospitality services, helping businesses manage bookings, cancellations, and other inquiries faster and more effectively.
• Novelty: Customers will have even more ways to access AI-driven services in the future. For example, AI-supported augmented and virtual reality applications and integrations could allow customers to tour amenities before making a reservation.
• Security: AI-powered encryptions already use algorithms to enhance safety for guest information, but in the future, these could also be applied on-site to manage and monitor hotel access to keep guests safe.

There’s no telling just how many facets of the customer experience AI will affect in the future. In our AI-powered CX Report, we also discovered that 87 percent of CX leaders expect AI to usher in a full-fledged CX evolution by 2027, and hospitality businesses that adopt CX-driven AI tools can now develop a competitive edge before then.

Frequently asked questions

Create a better customer service strategy with AI in hospitality

There will always be new hospitality customer service tips to help businesses adapt to meet evolving customer expectations. It’s crucial to use all the tools at your disposal to improve CX, especially a CX-focused AI tool that can help deliver faster, more efficient, and more satisfying service.

With Zendesk AI, you get exactly that. Zendesk is built with CX at its core, and its AI is trained on billions of customer interactions, so it’s ready to go on day one. That way, no matter the size of your company, you can ensure your guests receive the best service possible.

Try Zendesk for free to see what it can do for your hospitality customer service.