A new hospitality: How AI lets hotel operators do more with less stress

Running a hotel operation means doing a lot, with little more than a pillow mint. You're pricing rooms, keeping quality consistent across locations, and trying to stay coordinated with your team, all while competing against brands with bigger budgets and dedicated operations departments.

With the peak summer travel season just around the corner, hotel operators can ditch the sweets for a suite of cloud and AI tools that help deliver the best operations and customer experience services at a fraction of the cost or scale. Finally, you can unlock the same capabilities that major chains have, without major overhead.

The introduction of generative AI chat and vibe coding are taking things to a new level, too. Lean teams can now implement advanced features across platforms and embrace chatbots to help with both internal and external requests.

Here's a look at just some of the ways that franchise operators are using Google Cloud, alongside tools from Google Search, YouTube, and Maps, to make the most of this year’s peak season and beyond. (And if you’re especially focused on boosting bookings and loyalty, check out our companion post on how AI is helping with marketing and brand management at large chains and boutique operations alike.)

Demand Forecasting and Revenue Optimization

As hotels prepare for a busy travel season, accurately predicting demand is crucial for optimizing room rates and maximizing revenue. AI models can help analyze real-time data, including holiday event schedules and competitor pricing, to forecast demand and recommend optimal pricing strategies.

Leveraging AI models to analyze vast amounts of data d(both structured and unstructured) in real time, including historical data, seasonal trends, local events, and competitor activity, are critical to forecasting demand and recommend optimal pricing strategies. This helps hotel revenue management groups respond to fluctuations in the market, ensuring they can capture revenue during peak periods and maintain competitive rates during slower times.

By leveraging AI models, hotels can move toward maximizing total revenue per guest, which includes ancillary revenue streams such as parking, spa and food and beverage sales. This strategic approach to revenue management helps hotels stay competitive and profitable in addition to allowing learnings on guest behavior which supports loyalty objectives. Google Cloud products such as BigQuery helps to unify data. Additionally, using Vertex AI allows hotels to build predictive models that forecast demand and recommend optimal room rates.

RIU Hotels & Resorts leverages Google Cloud AI and machine learning models to predict user purchase probability for the e-commerce team:

[Click through to listen in English on YouTube.]

Localized Maps Grounding

To capture demand, a hotel's digital presence must be accurate and easily discoverable. Localized maps grounding ensures that a hotel's information is correctly displayed and provides rich, real-time data to potential guests. This allows travelers to discover what is nearby, such as restaurants or local attractions, helping them make more confident decisions about their stay. It also allows brands to provide a consistent experience across all locations.

For marketing and sales teams, the Google Maps Platform can help travelers make more confident decisions about their stay. Additionally, grounding with Google Maps in Vertex AI connects Gemini models with geospatial data, which helps AI applications provide localized, real-time context for users, making marketing efforts more targeted and effective.

Hotels can provide a consistent experience across all locations by ensuring accurate and up-to-date information on digital maps. Using tools like the Google Maps Platform and its Places API, hotels can get precise location data and imagery for millions of points of interest, helping guests discover nearby restaurants or local attractions.

Optimizing Operations and Brand Standards

Maintaining consistent brand standards and optimizing operations across a network of widely distributed locations can be a challenge. However, cloud and AI solutions can streamline communication and provide real-time operational insights.

For example, AI-powered platforms such as Vertex AI Vision can ingest and analyze video data to provide real-time insights into a hotel’s operations. A hotel could use this technology to ensure adherence to brand standards, such as a clean and well-stocked lobby, by analyzing video feeds and alerting staff to issues. This kind of technology not only optimizes operations but also helps improve the overall guest experience.

Additionally, collaborative tools like Google Workspace provide a solution for streamlining hospitality management and improving communication. These versatile productivity and collaboration tools enable seamless organizational coordination, resulting in faster response times for hotel management and staff. This kind of technology drives transformative operational efficiencies and enhances communication across the entire network, both with guests and staff and drives owner satisfaction.

Mayank Khandelwal, co-founder of Treebo Hotels on transforming India's budget hotel experience with a pioneering digital platform:

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration

For a network of lodging locations, seamless communication is key to maintaining a consistent guest experience and operational efficiency. Collaborative tools like Google Workspace provide a solution, streamlining communication both with guests and across the entire network.

Hotel operations can use shared, collaborative inboxes to ensure that no guest inquiry is missed, allowing multiple staff members to work on a single request and provide timely, comprehensive responses.

Enhancing the guest experience by offering a more responsive and professional service. Additionally, tools like Google Chat and Spaces allow for real-time communication between ownership groups and brand leadership, facilitating the quick sharing of best practices, operational updates, and brand standards. By ensuring every location is connected and working with the most current information, a brand can maintain consistency and a high level of quality across all its properties.

Jason Simpson, vice president of Engineering and Operations at Choice Hotels International, on how Choice must simultaneously enhance the guest experience and enhance communication across its network of franchised hotels: