A practical guide to AI in hospitality
Imagine arriving at your hotel and skipping check-in entirely. Your phone unlocks the door, the AI-powered smart room adjusts to your temperature preferences instantly, and your favorite snacks arrive shortly after via a room service bot. This scenario is no longer limited to sci-fi: it’s the approaching reality of AI in hospitality.
Beyond the futuristic front-of-house applications, AI is also transforming back-of-house operations for hotels: forecasting demand, automating housekeeping schedules, and unifying data to make decision-making, marketing, and personalization go further.
But while 73 % of hoteliers say that AI will transform the industry, AI adoption in hospitality lags behind other sectors at around 41%. Despite its promise, AI in hospitality has its challenges. Namey, the high cost of implementation and potential impacts on the guest experience. In an industry built on personal touches, excessive automation risks eroding the warmth and trust that define great hospitality—and invite customer loyalty.
Read on to learn how AI is redefining guest service, improving revenue management and efficiency—even creating new service models. Plus, a roadmap to help you gain the benefits, address the challenges, and implement AI in hospitality effectively.
What is AI in hospitality?
AI in hospitality refers to the use of various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve guest experiences, operational efficiency, and profitability for hotels, resorts, and travel services. By analyzing vast amounts of data in real-time, AI enables organizations to deliver guest services that feel more personal while making hotel operations run more smoothly and profitably.
Overall, AI is transforming the hospitality industry on two fronts:
1. Front of house: Enhancing the guest experience
Hoteliers use AI to deliver service that’s more personalized, seamless, and responsive to guests' needs, without necessarily losing the human touch. For example, virtual AI concierges and chatbots respond instantly to guest inquiries, while smart recommendation engines tailor room settings, dining suggestions, or omnichannel marketing offers to individual preferences and behaviors.
By automating routine and transactional tasks—check-ins, booking confirmations, or service requests—AI frees up frontline teams to focus on providing the best guest experience.
2. Back of house: Driving profitability and efficiency
AI algorithms power analytics that help hotels to anticipate demand, reduce costs, and operate more efficiently based on a dynamic mix of real-time, historical, and external data. Predictive analytics can forecast occupancy rates or staffing needs, optimize pricing and revenue management, and reveal guest or market insights to increase revenue. It also helps automate processes like scheduling, procurement, and predictive maintenance.
Agentic AI, by unifying and putting data to work intelligently, brings a new level of data-driven insight, targeting, visibility, and automation across properties to boost performance. Generative AI helps teams craft and deliver more tailored experiences in a fraction of the time, helping to drive customer satisfaction, productivity, and growth.
Understanding AI in hospitality
AI now touches every part of the hospitality ecosystem, emerging as a core technology layer for hotels in the future. Once limited to website chatbots and recommendation engines, the global AI in hospitality market is expected to surge from $90 million in 2023 to more than $8 billion by 2033.
For hotels, AI’s ability to analyze and apply data intelligently at scale brings a new level of precision and agility to operations. Insights from predictive AI analytics can power everything from revenue management to dynamic pricing, automated staffing to predictive maintenance—creating efficiencies that improve decision-making and net operating income (NOI).
For guests, AI now spans the travel journey, from booking to post-stay engagement. For example, AI-powered search and booking assistants—also known as agentic commerce—enable travelers to discover, plan, and reserve hotels directly from AI tools like ChatGPT or AI agents, without relying on OTAs.
According to the 2025 State of Hotel Guest Technology Report, 58% of guests say AI improves their booking and stay, while 65% want hotel technology to be more advanced than their own. This contrast between rising expectations and growing acceptance highlights the industry’s biggest AI opportunity and challenge. Guests are attracted to new conveniences and experiences, but AI can undermine their trust and brand reputation if deployed without discernment and backed by effective AI monitoring and safeguards.
The question for most hotels is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to build it and deploy it responsibly.
Core types of AI in hospitality
There is no single AI tool for the hotel industry to adopt. Instead, AI is embedded across every business layer, from the front desk to the back office. These complementary AI technologies fall into three main categories, each serving a unique role in transforming how hospitality works and feels.
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Business benefits of AI in hospitality
AI in hospitality is poised to reshape the traditional way hotels do business. Here are some of the many ways that AI helps with hospitality operations and boosts guest services:
Enhanced customer service: AI-powered customer service for hospitality can elevate guest experiences by accelerating interactions, personalizing service offerings, and maintaining a consistently high quality of service from booking to check-out. This is vital for the hospitality firms, which rely on loyalty, as per a recent industry report, which showed loyalty members accounted for 52.8% of occupied rooms in 2024, as membership across major chains surged by 14.5%.
Personalized guest experiences: From tailored loyalty rewards to smart rooms that set the guest's preferred lights and music, personalization is a key driver of guest satisfaction, spending, and loyalty. AI algorithms can analyze historical guest data and behavior in real time to tailor interactions, creating bespoke experiences that help hospitality companies boost occupancy rates and repeat stays.
Operational efficiency: By automating front office processes such as reservations, inventory management, and reporting, as well as guest relations tasks like answering basic queries, AI helps hotels to create new efficiencies. Per a recent industry survey, increased efficiency is the top way (39%) hospitality leaders say AI will reshape operations.
Enhanced revenue management: When supplied with adequate financial data and historical business intelligence, AI-driven analytics transform revenue management. By analyzing data, demand signals, and market conditions, AI systems can make real-time pricing adjustments to dynamically optimize occupancy rates, cash flow, and profitability—yielding gains in net operating income (NOI) and omnichannel sales for hotels across seasons.
Data-driven insights: AI’s ability to analyze large, complex datasets makes it a top innovation area for business analytics today and into the future. By uncovering trends in guest behavior, seasonal demand, and operational costs, hotels can forecast more accurately, allocate resources strategically, enhance segmentation and targeting, and power automation with confidence.
Precision marketing: Hospitality marketing teams use AI to craft hyper-targeted campaigns, optimize social engagement, and respond to guest feedback in real time. GenAI-created copy and visuals accelerate creative productivity, while predictive analytics improve personalization and targeting. Agentic AI goes further, analyzing historical data and live context to trigger the right offer in the moment to boost conversion and loyalty.
Security and monitoring: A recent survey shows 68% of hospitality IT professionals cite improving the safety of guests and staff as a top technology priority. AI enhances surveillance and building access systems, enabling faster anomaly detection and real-time alerts for suspicious activity or potential threats.
Sustainability efforts: AI plays a pivotal role in smart-building technologies, helping hotels track and reduce energy and water consumption. By analyzing usage patterns and optimizing HVAC, lighting, and waste systems, AI supports sustainability goals while lowering utility costs and carbon footprint.
Crisis management: AI systems can detect emerging risks faster than traditional hospitality systems, from severe weather to supply disruptions—then support real-time responses. For example, generative AI helps craft personalized alerts and guidance for guests, enabling hotels to manage crises proactively while maintaining guest safety and trust.
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8 best AI use cases in hospitality (with real-life examples)
AI use cases in hospitality are expanding rapidly, creating new possibilities for guest service and new business models for the industry. Here are some of the most impactful:
1. Contactless check-in and checkout
Faster, more convenient check-ins and checkout are becoming a guest expectation in the hospitality industry, and AI can help. According to Amadeus Research's Traveler Tribes Report 2033, 64% of guests want to check in using their mobile devices, while 53% prioritize hotels that offer contactless payment options.
With AI-enabled mobile apps or kiosks, hotels can automate check-in and checkout for guests. This improves guest satisfaction and reduces front-desk congestion, freeing hotel staff to focus on customer interactions that drive loyalty and repeat stays.
Property spotlight: Major hotel brands, such as Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott, now offer mobile check-in and keyless entry via their mobile apps. Perks include allowing guests to pre-select special rooms and check in early.
2. AI concierge
Chatbots are perhaps the most widespread form of AI in hospitality, and these virtual assistants have evolved from FAQ bots into all-purpose concierges. They use natural language understanding (NLU) to provide instant, personalized, multilingual support across websites, apps, and in-room devices around the clock. For example, they pull from the hotel's internal policies to handle routine questions about pool hours, restaurant recommendations, or extra bedding requests.
AI agents are the new generation of chatbots, able to retrieve external data and act on behalf of staff or guests in real time to create a more enjoyable stay. For instance, an AI agent for hospitality could offer guests the local weather forecasts, research and suggest nightlife activities, even recommend then book local dining experiences—all without human intervention.
A recent Statista survey found that 50% travelers are interested in hotels that offer AI concierge services. Beyond attracting guests, agentic systems enable staff to prioritize meaningful guest interactions, boosting productivity without compromising guest satisfaction.
Property spotlight: Many major hotel brands offer chatbots. Beyond this, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel in California, features a holographic concierge in select suites.
3. Enhanced guest experiences
AI is transforming personalization in the hospitality industry from a scattered, reactive approach to a proactive, unified understanding of who guests are and what matters to them. By analyzing stays, preferences, feedback, and booking patterns, AI-driven hotel systems can create dynamic guest profiles that tailor every aspect of a stay—from surprising welcome amenities to local suggestions to tailored post-stay offers.
According to EHL Hospitality Insights, 61% of hotel guests would pay more for customized experiences, yet only 23% received high personalization on their last stay. Agentic AI enables this by understanding and acting on live context signals and historical guest data, making interactions more timely and relevant. By connecting across formerly siloed systems, AI agents enable the seamless, scalable delivery of enhanced guest experiences that make each stay unique.
Property spotlight: Marriott's Renaissance Hotels offers guests curated recommendations for local dining and activities through its AI-powered agent concierge that pulls data from ChatGPT and employee favorite lists to enhance guest stays.
4. Personalized marketing offers
AI enables hospitality marketers to be more precise and data-driven, shifting from generic promotions to real-time, guest-specific experiences that convert better. Deloitte’s 2025 Travel Trends highlights that timely, targeted deals drive incremental spending among hotel guests.
AI algorithms can analyze guest behavior, booking history, and spend sensitivity, while AI agents proactively trigger the delivery across all integrated channels and platforms of more timely, relevant offers. AI-driven segmentation can cluster customers by behavior, intent, and historical activity to improve targeting and marketing ROI. According to McKinsey, AI-driven personalized campaigns now drive about 40% of revenue for top hospitality brands.
Property spotlight: The Accor Group delivers hyper-personalized offers based on past bookings and behaviors. By anticipating guest needs, the company demonstrates knowledge of guest preferences while leaving room for choice, helping to drive direct bookings and lasting loyalty.
5. Smart rooms with energy optimization
With guest expectations rising and operational costs tightening, AI-powered smart rooms offer hotels a way to achieve greater personalization and greater efficiency. By integrating IoT sensors and voice recognition AI technology, these rooms automatically adjust lighting, temperature, entertainment, and other settings to guests’ preferences.
The result is a more comfortable, tailored stay that's also more energy efficient. These rooms support sustainability efforts, reducing energy and water consumption by automatically powering off room lights when guests are away.
Property spotlight: Marriott Hotels rolled out AI voice-activated assistants in select properties, allowing guests to control lights, thermostats, and entertainment systems using voice commands to enhance guest comfort while reducing energy use.
6. Conversational AI support
Conversational AI goes far beyond the clunky IVRs and call center scripts of traditional hospitality, using NLU to deliver tailored support that saves time for both hotel guests and staff. AI enables hospitality systems to engage in fluid, human-like dialogue while understanding guest context, tone, and emotion using sentiment analysis.
Hotels use conversational AI for hospitality to autonomously manage reservations, handle guest inquiries, and scale high-quality support across key channels to drive efficiency. With agentic AI integrations, hotel systems can even remember individual guests in long-term memory, helping to better anticipate guest needs and ensure fast, effective support at scale.
Property spotlight: Charlestowne Hotels uses a voice AI agent to provide real-time conversational support that instantly replies to guest questions with nuance—allowing the brand to replace its call centers while gathering valuable insights.
7. Operational efficiency
AI is transforming hotel operations by automating tasks, optimizing resource allocation, and predicting maintenance needs before they disrupt service. AI systems can dynamically adjust staffing levels, monitor equipment performance, and optimize housekeeping schedules using real-time occupancy data and more.
This shift from reactive to proactive, AI-driven operations reduces downtime, cuts costs, and enables consistently high service standards across every property.
Property spotlight: Hilton uses AI to forecast housekeeping demand and optimize cleaning routes, lowering labor costs while maintaining cleanliness standards.
8. Revenue management & forecasting
Unlike traditional methods that rely on human input and intuition, AI-powered revenue management is automated, dynamic, and data-driven. ML models analyze vast datasets—from competitor pricing and booking patterns to weather forecasts and local events—to recommend optimal hotel rates and promotions in real time.
The result is more accurate forecasting, faster pricing adjustments, and greater agility in response to market shifts, helping hotels to optimize revenue across channels. According to 2025 research, hotels using AI-driven revenue management systems report an average 15–20% increase in RevPAR (revenue per available room) and improved forecasting accuracy. This enables operators to balance occupancy and profitability, increasing both precision and productivity.
Property spotlight: InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) rolled out an AI revenue management system across 5,000 hotels, boosting RevPAR through smarter segmentation and offer bundling.
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A roadmap to value with AI in hospitality
To unlock AI’s full potential, hospitality leaders must embed AI into their core business strategy. Like previous digital transformations, getting value from AI requires more than experimentation, but strategic investment, well-structured governance, and cultural alignment. According to McKinsey, companies that redesign existing workflows end-to-end, rather than simply bolting AI onto existing processes, are far more likely to drive significant ROI from AI investments.
This enables leaders to overcome the real challenges of AI integration, which range from the high cost of implementation to integration complexity to the need to constantly balance the presence of automation with the human touch that defines great hospitality.
The following framework outlines a strategic approach for successfully implementing AI in hospitality:
1. Reimagine the business around AI
Begin by establishing a dedicated AI strategy team or innovation hub to drive adoption across the organization. Their mission: identify the use cases where AI can deliver the most value, whether in guest experience, loyalty programs, or back-office efficiency.
It’s important to have a clear understanding of what AI requires to be effective, including:
Clean, well-structured data that AI systems rely on to operate effectively
Clearly defined workflows and measurable objectives that enable AI to run reliably
Executive sponsorship to guide employee adoption and maintain vision
Robust AI governance to ensure safe, responsible, scalable operations
2. Build infrastructure for the future
Modernizing legacy systems is critical to scalable AI adoption. For the hospitality industry, a future-ready AI ecosystem hinges on four critical layers:
Data governance: Ensures the quality, accessibility, and compliance of both structured and unstructured data for AI use across global operations. This includes meticulous data collection, cleansing, preprocessing, and annotation.
AI models: The predictive engines that power AI analysis, insights, and decision-making. Various models exist; choosing the right one for your target use case is made easier with websites like Huggingface.
AI-enabled applications: The interfaces that translate intelligence into real-world guest and staff experiences. For example: web or in-app chatbots for customers, and copilots for employees.
AI platforms: Various tools are emerging that simplify the process of building, training, and deploying AI systems, from dev-focused frameworks to no-code builders. For example, Sendbird’s AI agent builder helps non-technical teams to quickly build, manage, and scale custom AI agents for support and CX.
Sendbird makes it fast and easy for support and CX teams to build, monitor, and fine-tune AI agents for hospitality.
3. Encourage employee uptake
Even the best AI can stumble if organizational enthusiasm lags behind ambition. In fact, 31% of employees are actively resisting AI initiatives in their companies—often citing fears of job displacement, lack of training, or uncertainty about how AI will impact their role.
The goal for AI leaders should be to demonstrate how this new technology can simplify their daily tasks and improve overall efficiency. This approach helps staff to feel that AI complements their skills rather than replaces them. To enhance uptake and overall satisfaction, consider implementing user-friendly interfaces, guided assistance, and intuitive workflows to make the transition more manageable and efficient.
4. Build AI you can trust at scale
Trust in AI is paramount in the hospitality industry. AI systems traffic in sensitive customer data that, if breached, risks a loss of customer trust, reputational damage, and noncompliance. To safeguard guest trust and organizational integrity, leaders must:
Implement a comprehensive AI governance framework such as Sendbird's Trust OS to define your AI policies, oversight, and accountability practices.
Enforce robust AI cybersecurity controls to prevent model manipulation, data leakage, prompt injection attacks, and other emerging threats.
Build every AI system and workflow for reliability, privacy, fairness, and transparency from the start.
By following these steps, hospitality companies can position themselves to capitalize on the transformative capabilities of AI, driving innovation and securing a competitive edge in an industry that increasingly runs on AI.
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AI in hospitality: Balancing automation with the human touch
To unlock AI’s full potential without running the risk of alienating guests, hotels must make trust the foundation of AI innovation. That requires deploying observable, explainable, and well-integrated AI systems built on enterprise-grade infrastructure with robust compliance and security safeguards. Together, these capabilities ensure consistent performance across every guest touchpoint—protecting brand reputation while providing real-time visibility into customer sentiment and giving teams the control to optimize AI behavior before it undermines guest experience.
How does Sendbird help?
With over a decade of experience powering secure, enterprise-grade communications for more than seven billion conversations worldwide, Sendbird’s AI agent platform delivers the infrastructure and APIs that enable safe, scalable, and personalized guest experiences across every channel. From real-time messaging and omnichannel support to AI observability and built-in safeguards, Sendbird helps hospitality brands deploy AI that’s not only powerful—but responsible, compliant, and built to preserve the human connection at the heart of hospitality.
Curious how our omnichannel AI agents for hospitality deliver the best voice-enabled support and CX engagement across channels?
