Beyond The Hype: How to Make AI Work for Your Hospitality Business

By Emin Kara | November 1, 2023

Recently there’s been a huge boom in companies implementing artificial intelligence. In my opinion, most companies do an incredibly poor job of it. They just want to catch the trend and use the buzzword “AI” when selling their product or service.

Unlike them, this article aims to give you some real, outside-of-the-box ideas you can implement to increase customers and increase customer retention. In my business, I’ve never settled for the churn and burn process, and neither should you… so let’s get with it! 

Here’s where my head is at when I think AI, and it’s where yours should be too: J.A.R.V.I.S (Just A Rather Intelligent System) from Iron Man. Whenever you’re thinking about AI, don’t think surface level, it gets so much deeper than that. You should feel like Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man whenever you’re cooking up new ideas. 

Now that we have mindset out of the way, here are my ideas for implementing AI into your business with a marketing forward approach. 

AI-Driven Personal Concierge: AI’s biggest superpower is its ability to learn, so the more data the better. Right now, data is everything. Why do you think Elon Musk bought Twitter for way more than what it was valued at? It wasn’t because of a meme as he’d like you to think, it’s because of the HUGE pools of data the platform collects, not to mention his ties with OpenAI and other AI software, too. The takeaway from this is to start gathering as much information on your customers as possible. Now, please ensure that you collect and use this data in an ethical and legally permissible manner. We have another premium article on the legality of AI here.

Once you have that data, then you can start to build an AI-Driven Personal Concierge, which will recommend to your customers: 

• The best food options on your menu based on their preferences. 
• Local places close to your hotel they should go visit best tailored to their preferences. 
• Movie recommendations at a local cinema with times of showings that best suit their schedule. 

The list is endless! If you have an app for your business, I’d highly recommend implementing an AI-Driven Personal Concierge. 

Social Media Analysis: If you have an app for your establishment, allow users to connect their social media profiles to it. From here, use AI to constantly analyze their profile. From here, set up automation that will send them special offers based on their preferences. To illustrate, we all have those people on social media that will post a photo of their salad when they’re on a diet or a steak when they’re at a restaurant. If you had an AI system that constantly scraped and analyzed visual data when customers posted photos of their food, you could send them offers immediately based on their preferences or dietary journeys. 

Enhanced Loyalty Programs: Realistically, most businesses that implement a loyalty program make it super generic. We understand that everyone has different preferences, so why should loyalty programs be a “one size fits all” solution? They shouldn’t. So, use AI to create tailored loyalty programs for each and every customer based on their preferences. I guarantee your customers will be more driven to complete the loyalty program if it’s specific to their needs. Nobody wants something they don’t need, so give them rewards that are desirable specifically to them. 

Predictive Maintenance: Every business owner’s worst nightmare is a bad review – if you’ve read my previous article on this subject, you’ve hopefully cut down on the negative feedback. But, some bad reviews are inevitable, so predictive maintenance can be a solution for you. Ultimately, everyone would love the ability to stop something bad from happening before it happens, but what if I told you that you might be able to do that? Predictive maintenance would be the solution to this. Imagine you had an AI system that could predict when something would break. Not only would it stop bad reviews from being created, but you wouldn’t lose money on emergency repairs, and you could extend the life of equipment. 

Predictive Services: Before AI was as advanced and easily accessible, I worked with a client who had recorded tons of data points for his business. He’d gathered so much data that he could predict pretty accurately how busy he’d be on just the weather alone! If you started to collect data on, let’s say, beverage orders and data that would affect that such as weather, you’d have the ability to ask the AI to look at the weather and predict how many of those drinks you’d sell in that day. You’d never have to worry about losing money because you didn’t have enough stock to supply the demand. Nor would you have to worry about losing money on buying stock that will ultimately go out of date.

AI is an incredible tool that every business owner should be seeking to utilize and implement. However, do not seek to implement it in a buzzword fashion, you should aim to actually make it useful for customers and have an end goal for it! Always go deeper with the ideas you’re thinking about. Everyone thinks surface level, so you should stand out from the crowd.