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Transcript

Introduction to AI chatbots in hospitality
 
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another Matt Talks. This week, I want to talk about chatbots. Looking at our marketplace, it is the one category that is absolutely blowing up, and we're starting to see hoteliers really experiment with it.
 
And from our customer base, we've already started seeing that over a thousand hotels have now deployed a chatbot or a CRM solution with AI built in. And I wanted to help give you an understanding of what the differences are between the different platforms. So I went into the marketplace and I said, who is the number four based on sales numbers? The number one is Akia.
 
So they are really leading the way in terms of the chatbots. The number two is Duve, and they've really had a meteoric rise in the last year. Runnr.ai is doing an incredible job. And then lastly, you've got HiJiffy.
 
And these four make up the top four. And I asked the founders of those companies to come in and give us their pitch. So I said, you get five minutes each, two minutes to pitch the product. Then you get some time to respond to what does your solution do better than humans?
 
And then the last question is anything exciting on the roadmap for the next twelve months? And I've asked those same three questions to all of the founders, and hopefully that gives you some insights and hopefully a perspective on which is the AI bot that is right for you. The thing that's happened in the last few years is that customers are reaching out to you. So guests are reaching out to hotels.
 
They're asking questions across different platforms, and it is impossible to keep up with it. So you need a centralized kind of inbox, whilst at the same time, you want to have proactive conversations with customers. You want to entice them to ask questions, but you want to reach out to them or upsell solutions to them. And I think that's why it's important to really dig into what AI can do today and what are some of the future plans.
 
I hope you enjoy

Chapter
Building hotel guest journeys with Akia
 
this. Evan is here from Akia, and we're going to just briefly introduce what they do and what the future looks like for Akia. But, Evan, do you want to maybe introduce yourself briefly?
 
Yeah. Hey, everyone. I'm Evan. I'm the founder and CEO at Akia.
 
Nice.
 
Yeah. I do a little bit of everything here, but all the heavy lifting really just done by the team.
 
Yeah. I always struggle with when people say like, what do you do? And it's like, I'm the CEO. I do, I don't know, very little actually, but a lot a lot at the same time.
 
Yeah. No. Exactly.
 
So the first question that I have is, can you give me a two minutes demo? And I am checking like, I'm a sucker for time. So if you can hit us with a two minutes kind of pitch for what Akia does.
 
Yeah. So we are a guest experience platform. We facilitate a lot of the back and forth communication between hotels and guests. Obviously, we leverage a lot of the LLM and AI agents in this communication.
 
So we allow hoteliers to build a guest journey through all of the different touch points along guest travel. We also allow them to build what we call mini apps. These are web-based apps that enhance the text message touch points. They can be things like digital registration cards, surveys, menus, and so on and so forth.
 
But ultimately, what we are doing is looking to offload a lot of the heavier day to day operations are a little bit more taxing for the the average front desk worker through streamlined communication and automated messages.
 
So what problems do you solve better than humans?
 
Well, so I would say it's a little bit twofold. Right? We have always thought of ourselves as a sort of automation company that streamlines the operations around the business. And so a lot of the things that we are relieving from the typical workforce in the hotel is usually the mundane tasks.
 
So the things that we do better, it really is just like we don't, the AI doesn't complain about anything. Right? And it's able to repeatedly answer the question, what time can I check in? Can I check in early?
 
Is my room available? And, yeah, front desk worker, they can spend more time and energy focused on the guests in front of them or focused on creating a pleasant experience rather than answering the same questions over and over again.
 
Consistency in staying friendly and staying helpful.
 
That's right.
 
Yeah. I love that. Yeah. What does it, products, you know, there's a lot already there today. What are some of the things you're excited about that you're building for the next twelve months?
 
Yeah. So we've invested heavily in AI agents in the last year. Right now, we have gotten it to a point where the inbox agent, the chatbot, is very effective at responding to a lot of the guest inquiries and communicating with the guests and facilitating things like upsells and and so on and so forth. The outlook for the next twelve months really is taking this exact same technology and leveraging it throughout different parts of the hospitality business.
 
So when we think of ourselves, we really think about ourselves as building the future of agentic hospitality. And so we have proof of concepts around revenue managers, marketing teams, in addition to just communicating with guests, which we consider more of the front end, the AI is able to answer questions that are generally relatively taxing for corporate teams like, will help me forecast revenue for the rest of this year, help me build a marketing campaign for my strongest cohort. And because of the infrastructure that we've already developed along the guest journey, the AI is able to take a lot of that backend information and translate that into, translate that into things on the front ends.
 
You know, SMS campaigns, email campaigns, WhatsApp messages, improving that to drive more revenue and streamline things around the business.
 
Nice. That sounds really cool. Yeah. How, my last unscripted question. You're in our top 4 of chatbots that we're seeing in the ҹɫֱ²¥ Marketplace. What do you do specifically with ҹɫֱ²¥ that makes you so successful?
 
So I think I mean, this is more of like this is more of a what you guys do. Right? Like, the API that you guys have available is really top tier. And so because of that, we've been able to build a ton of sort of like triggers and automations that the AI chatbot can leverage. So if a guest messages in and asks for early check-in or a room upgrade or anything like that, we can actually, the AI agent is capable of calling the API, understanding if there's room availability, and then messaging that back to the guest. And so our customers just need to define, you know, what does early check-in look like in terms of cost? And we can use the chatbot and the ҹɫֱ²¥ API in conjunction with that to deliver that experience to the guests all in one flow.

Chapter
How Duve scales guest personalization
 
Right. That's amazing. Thank you for joining me today. Jeremy is one of the founders of Duve. Duve is one of those top 4 players in the chatbot space or the agent space in our marketplace, and I invited them, obviously, to do his pitch as well. So, Jeremy, you've got two minutes. Go.
 
Hey. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us on the podcast. So a bit about Duve. Duve is a guest experience platform.
 
We basically manage the end-to-end guest experience, everything from pre-arrival to in-stay experiences with guest app, with content, upselling, and etc. Where Duve AI fits is that basically, Duve has a communication app that has a unified inbox that manages all the different channels of communication of the hotels. So everything from WhatsApp, email, SMS, chat, even OTA messaging, like Booking.com and Expedia, and we kind of unify all of that, translate it in all different languages, and manage all of those communications with prescheduled messages, triggered messages, and etc.
 
Duve has acquired a company called Easyway in 2023 that was doing generative AI agents for the hospitality industry, and basically embedded the capabilities of Easyway into the Duve platform. The difference between what Duve does in generative AI versus other vendors in the space, basically, is that AI is based on two things. It's based on a prompt, which basically gives the rules of engagements to your AI agent. It explains how to engage, what to do, what to answer, what's the context of the question, etc.
 
And then you have the dataset. The dataset is usually a fixed dataset where you're gonna collect, I don't know, a PDF file, a Word file with information about the hotel, and some details that are static details, let's call them like that. What we've done differently is that our AI agent is generating a new dynamic dataset for every question coming in. So basically, we contextualize the question every time a question comes in.
 
Who is the guest? What's his reservation details? What's his profile? What's the room he booked?
 
What's the live inventory and information we have from ҹɫֱ²¥ and etc? And according to that, we're gonna answer differently to each and every one of the questions, depending on the personalization of each and every one of the guests. And I think we're done with the two minutes.
 
Nice. Thank you for that.
 
If you look at Duve, what are some of the problems that you solve better than humans in hotels where you think that hotels should be deploying Duve?
 
So the thing that Duve does well, or best, let's call it like that, is that we allow you to scale the personalization of the experience you give to guests. So in a perfect world, you as the GM of the hotel would be the one greeting all of your guests. You'd be the one checking them in. You'd be the one servicing them and etc, because you will be the one that does it the best.
 
The problem is that you are dependent on your teams, which can vary depending on the team member that is servicing every guest, and you're dependent on manual work to structure the journey and the experience of your guests. Once you digitalize that process, and once you personalize that on a digital scale, it allows you to not miss those guests. Okay? You're seeing all of your guests.
 
You're knowing all of your guests. You're treating each and every one of them in a way that's special to him without having to have infinite number of employees doing so for you. So what Duve does best today is allowing you as a hotel to show your guests that you know them, that you understand them, and that you can give them that experience that they're looking for without necessarily having to have overstaffing in your hotels.
 
Nice. And that's what Duve does today. Gen AI is moving at a pace that is faster than anyone can imagine.
 
Like, what are some of the things you're excited about deploying or building in the next twelve months. So one of the big projects of Duve is connecting the generative AI agent and the communication and the personalization of the communication to the actual automations that we have within our platform.
 
So Duve kind of plays a part of a middleware for the hotel. So we're connected to the PMS, but we're also connected to the task management system, to the digital keys, to the POS system, to the upsellings and etc. And all of those flow into the communication above Duve. So today, when a guest is going to ask me, hey, can I do a room upgrade, for example, instead of just giving me a template and answer from a fixed dataset, we're going to go check for his live inventory and etc, and we're going to redirect him to his personal area to book his room upgrade according to the live availabilities. The next step is actually humanizing it even more by transforming it to a completely conversational experience. So, for example, and we've already started implementing that today, when guests are asking for room amenities, towels, shower caps, slippers, or whatever, our platform knows how to transform that into actual actions and push those actions back into the task management system.
 
And what we're gonna be seeing more and more in Duve, is more and more of that ecosystem around the platform of Duve is gonna be fully automated through generative AI and through conversational experience for the guests.
 
Love that. Last bonus question. Can you talk about one customer where, you know, you had a really big impact on the way that they operated their hotel?
 
Okay.
 
Yes. So one very large customer of ours was basically decentralized. They have over two hundred hotels all across Europe, and they had a decentralized communication center where basically every hotel had its own guest relation manager, let's call it like that, that was managing all of the communication with their guests and etc.
 
And with the combined capability of Duve, multi-property platform that allowed him to have all of his property under one single dashboard, and the generative AI agent, he was able to reduce his workload on the communication from having a single person in each and every one of his hotels multiplied by two hundred hotels, to having one single communication center, where he has, I think, three shifts of eight people managing the communication for all of their group. That's amazing. Yeah. And without compromising on the personalization of the answers that these guests are getting today.

Chapter
Next level guest comms on WhatsApp with Runnr.ai
 
Nice. Thank you, Jeremy. Pleasure. And we have Michiel from Runnr.ai here, and I wanted to just ask you what is your two minute pitch?
 
Thank you, Matt, for the invitation. So Runnr.ai is a virtual concierge on WhatsApp, and, we integrate with ҹɫֱ²¥ to collect information about the guests, and then we proactively engage with guests throughout the journey of the guests from the moment that they book till they have checked out. Meaning that we send a WhatsApp to confirm the reservation or that we confirm that they are close to arrive. And then we open the conversation with the guests via WhatsApp, and we apply AI in WhatsApp to, on one hand, automate the conversation. So FAQ,
 
right? And on the other hand, we also apply AI to automate work, such as, to automate upsells, so we can book breakfast straight from the conversation on the invoice in ҹɫֱ²¥, which is pretty cool. Right? So it's more than just answering FAQs.
 
And on the other hand, we're also building in all the functionalities such as we can collect the link for online check-in via ҹɫֱ²¥, and we can send that as well to the guest via WhatsApp. And also, we are able to send mobile keys, and we also integrate with housekeeping, software such as Flexkeeping to also automate housekeeping requests. So it's really more than just only a chatbot. It's really automating the communication for hotels with their guests and creating a seamless experience for them.
 
And why this is working is that on average, we can see that we can send to 80 percent of all the bookings, we can send them on WhatsApp. Everybody's opening it, and more than half is asking one or more of the questions in WhatsApp, making it an extremely effective place to communicate with your guests. And number two, hotels that report that 3/4 of the inbound is gone.
 
So less emails, less phone calls, less repetitive questions at the front desk. So there's really time to spend on the guests and really to become a host for the guest rather than an admin clerk. And three, we boost upsells, of course. As said, we proactively promote the breakfast upsells in chat to guests when there's no chat in the reservation, and the conversion there is humongous.
 
Nice. That's pretty cool.
 
Nice.
 
On top of that, we also have an integration with Booking.com inbox where we also automate conversation.
 
Nice. And the thing I like the most is what you said there is like integrating our online booking link into the messaging so that we drive the online check. So not only does it solve the communication challenges, but also it drives the online check-in, it drives further automation at the front desk as well. I really love that.
 
Cool. Awesome.
 
What does Runnr.ai do better than humans in hotels?
 
Always on is, of course, that we are always there. So we can, answer, any time of the day, any question towards the guest. But more importantly, of course, we also speak in any language that you can imagine, which is quite helpful. And what we get back from hotels that we work with is that the quality of the conversation is extremely high, sometimes even higher than from the staff that is who are working in the hotels because of the languages, because of what we know from the hotel, etc, etc. To the fact that we reach out to guests proactively in the guest journey really lowers the threshold to communicate with the hotel, and that makes it very flawless and easy to communicate with the hotel. And three, we always ask for the upsell. So when it's active at front desk, sometimes you the front desk is not always asking for the breakfast upsell, for example, and we always do, which is, of course, fantastic.
 
Nice. And if you then think about the year from now, which in AI times is a very long time, but what are some of the things you get really excited about?
 
Yeah. So what I'm very excited about is that, I think now, with the AI evolving very, very fast and you see a lot of innovation happening in the last two years. So everybody now knows AI from, write me a poem about xyz. Right?
 
But what I'm very excited about is that we can also apply AI nowadays more and more to perform tasks as well by using integrations. Hence, your APIs are great for that as well. So we can do more than just FAQ asset, and we are going to expand there more. So means upsell anything, means automating all the tasks such as changing times for check-in, check-out when that's requested, etc, straight into the PMS.
 
But also we are going to summarize the conversation, add that in the notes of the profile of the guest. And then you have the smart AI tips in ҹɫֱ²¥. And then when the guest is in front of the front desk, we will prompt the front office with a summary of the the conversation which the guest had with you as a hotel.
 
That is so good.
 
Secondly, we see a lot of traction from groups and chains. So we are now also going to work on multi-property inbox, meaning that either you can manage the conversation from one inbox for one hotel, or you can manage the conversation for multiple hotels in one inbox. And related to that is, of course, also the information about the hotels. So you don't wanna change one single source of information in all of the hotels, but you want to change it immediately in all the hotels with one click. And three, groups and chains are also investing a lot in their CRM loyalty program, etc.
 
And we're going to invest heavily there as well is to boost loyalty programs straight into the conversation. Same as what we do, for example, with the breakfast. If they, if a guest is not yet a member, then we will proactively ask the guest to enroll, to boost the programs of those chains that can be used for retention campaigns.
 
You have a busy year ahead, it sounds like.
 
Yes. Lots to do. Absolutely.
 
Thank you very much, Michiel.
 
Anytime, Matthijs. Thanks for the invitation. Welcome

Chapter
Solving guest conflicts with HiJiffy
 
Tiago, so nice to have you. HiJiffy. I give you two minutes, but you can do it faster, but you cannot do it longer. Give us your pitch.
 
Yeah. So HiJiffy is a guest communication hub for hotels. Guests expect instant answers and hotels are still juggling actually replying to them through email, phone, OTA, social media. There's so many channels to reply to guests from and what HiJiffy does is we unify every channel, so web chat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Booking.com, Expedia under one single inbox.
 
And it has an AI brain resolving 85 percent of the guest queries instantly. We've been around for a long time, eight years of hotel data already. That is what we use for our brain called Aplysia. And we've been adding a lot of different channels as recently we added Expedia and Booking.com inbox.
 
And of course, talking with you Matt, we're fully integrated with ҹɫֱ²¥ throughout the whole guest journey. And that's quite important from booking engine integration into PMS integration for us to send these in-stay campaigns that are related with the message being sent as soon as something changes in your reservation. So that's basically what we do in a nutshell.
 
Nice. I love it. And if you think about your solution, what problems do you solve better with your solution than humans can solve in hotels?
 
Yesterday, I was sharing actually on my LinkedIn, something quite interesting. Our marketing team just launched a new white paper of where is actually the line between humans and AI. And one of the things that is interesting was that which tasks should be handled? We made this question to a lot of people, like which tasks should not be handled by AI?
 
One of the things that came up, this answer was complaints. We do respect that it's something that hopefully is something you want to handle carefully. But a good example that I would like to give is, rather we totally agree that complaints probably should escalate and be treated by a human, it can still help. And how can AI help?
 
For example, we have a feature of sentiment analysis that is able to identify how angry that guest is, to escalate and for the hotelier to know that that's a priority within their inbox. So just transferring the conversation for the sake of passing it to an agent is not enough. Even in these cases, AI can actually help. That is so good.
 
If you look forward, like, and in the time of AI, twelve months feels like an endless amount of time. But what do you think will happen in the next twelve months for HiJiffy?
 
I was in HITEC last week or two weeks ago. I was with Damian of your team. He told me something regarding your vision of something that you see as very important as next steps is more and more you at ҹɫֱ²¥ when you open a reservation, having information regarding that guest and more and more information. One thing that I see on the next twelve months is all of us platforms of chatbots and guest messaging.
 
We are having so much data right now regarding those conversations that we're not being able to extract, to be honest. So we are able to say, okay, we have these automation rates, we're driving these direct bookings or this upselling or these online check-ins. But the question now here is how can we help providers as ҹɫֱ²¥ to then give the hotelier and the hotelier give back to the guests a better guest experience? As an example is, okay, if that guest already did a complaint, we should be able to retreat and give that to ҹɫֱ²¥, to the PMS, and so that the hotelier has access as soon as he checks in.
 
Or if he made a special request such as, it's our wedding anniversary, the hotelier should know if that was exchanged between hotel staff and the guests through WhatsApp. So this is where I see the next twelve months going. And that's where we at HiJiffy are going is how can we build this insight engine and within this insight engine to give it to other players, where hoteliers or sometimes within the front desk. And one of the most important players that we see in the market is ҹɫֱ²¥ and being the PMS world here, having that insight so that the front desk can have that information.
 
Nice.
 
I love it. Thank you for joining.
 
Thank you. Thank you for inviting, Matt.

Chapter
Why hotels should keep experimenting
 
I really hope that you've enjoyed that. I always really enjoy talking to different technology founders that are also solving a real problem for hospitality. And I wanted to get these four perspectives so that you have a clearer view on what might be the solution that you want to get a demo of and hopefully deploy at your hotel. And I think the most important things nowadays is to experiment.
 
Often, hoteliers are in this mindset of, don't want to make these big buying decisions because, you know, I'm going to be stuck with the software. But that isn't the case today. You can very easily try something out. And if you don't like it after a couple of months, you could move to something else.
 
But it is really important to continue experimenting and making sure that you find the solution that solves a real challenge for you. Thank you for sticking with us, I hope you enjoyed that.