AI is streamlining guests' data, enabling hotels to offer concierge-level service for business travellers.

This article was originally found on M&C / Asia.

AI can help streamline corporate travel and offer business travellers more personalised, tailored experiences. But to capitalise on its potential, there needs to be a combination of the right data and digital channels, working together with AI technology.

This was the subject of a recent podcast, hosted by the Global Business Travel Association, on how hotels and airlines are leveraging AI to improve revenue management, operations, sustainability and the business traveller experience.

Ryan Mann, partner at McKinsey, envisages a future where AI is empowering staff at hotels, improving the way they do their jobs and enabling them to spend more time with guests. "Some visions of AI are pretty bold and imaginative - frankly not the ones we really want to see happen," he said. "Hospitality must always include the human touch, a human smile and human empathy. (AI is impacting) areas such as hotels' revenue generation, their cost operations, and their customer experience. At the end of the day, it's about raising the bar on the essence of what hospitality is."

Streamlining feedback

One example where AI is benefiting the business travel customer experience is its ability to help streamline feedback. "One of our clients operates a large conference hotel in a big city and the general manager receives many emails from corporate groups with feedback, which tend to be verbose and not written in the clearest way," said Mann. "My client is using AI to read through those emails quickly, summarise and suggest a response, saving them hours (and enabling them to respond quicker) - it's a huge game changer."

Using guest profiles effectively

AI is also enabling hotels to deliver a more personalised customer service. As Mann pointed out, hotels have guest profiles with lots of rich yet unstructured notes about their best guests. "When we talk to general managers (at the hotels), they tell us these notes are useful but not actionable or organised in the best way possible," said Mann. "Now they are including AI- driven ‘best guest' action based on analytics for the frontline staff and it's created a huge change in guest experiences."

AI is going to need to show up in a big way to capture the hearts and minds and the wallets of business travel, according to Alex Cosmas, partner at McKinsey. He says concierge-level servicing, and how trips are planned and experienced, will become increasingly important.

"Delays happen, meetings get cancelled - business travel needs to be faster, more tailored and more instantaneous than the leisure market," he said. "It's time for business travel to catch up with how AI is penetrating consumer lives," added Cosmas.

AI can be applied to any part of corporate travel - pre-, during and post-trip and Cosmas pointed out how the technology can help alleviate certain ‘pressure' points, such as anxiety pre-trip and the time needed to recover from a trip.

Taking the first step

The podcast also reinforced how the most important element with regards to AI and business travel is about experimenting, particularly as the technology and its applications continue to develop at a rapid pace.

"Don't wait for perfect; start today and add as you go along," said Mann, while Cosmas added: "If you can't measure the cause and effect precisely from an AI intervention or an AI outcome, then don't even go down the path of the experiment. I'd rather experiment correctly on something small, than swing for the fences and have no idea where the ball got hit."