Alibaba AI Labs is all set to introduce a robot designed specifically for the hospitality sector, in October this year.

“Alibaba AI Labs’ robot is the next step in the evolution towards smart hotels,” said Chen Lijuan, general manager of Alibaba AI Labs, adding that the development will help “bridge the gap between guest needs and the response time they expect”.

From its deployment in October, the new robot will be able to deliver food or laundry to guests, offering a glimpse into the future of hotel service. Guests can talk to the robot, using voice commands, touch and hand gestures. Its answers are powered by AliGenie, the software behind the Tmall Genie smart speaker made by Alibaba AI Labs.

The robot, slightly under one metre in height, moves at a speed of up to one metre per second. It is cased in aluminium and features multi-sense data functionality, along with parallel computing, for fast responses.

Onboard are a semantic map, autonomous navigation system to identify and dodge obstacles, a communications system to control elevators and facial-recognition technology for ID verification.

The global market for service robots is on the rise. Citing the International Federation of Robotics, Alibaba says there the market is growing between 20 and 25 per cent from 2018 and 2020, with sales during that period totaling around US$27 billion for the professional service segment.

After a trial of the service robot at hotels, AI Labs will determine whether it’s suitable for use in hospitals, restaurants and offices.

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More and more hotels are coming to terms with the fact that increasing the value of their brand is directly proportional to achieving in-depth customer service with properly harnessed customer insight. This has necessitated the rise of hotels where customers are not only lured with interiors, but also with very real, AI robot concierge services.

Just a few days back, Amazon announced a new program designed to help hotels deploy Alexa’s voice-enabled smarts across their properties. The Alexa for Hospitality program will “help increase guest access to amenities” and “improve employee productivity,” according to a press release.This is more than simply putting an Echo on your bedside table to replicate the tasks performed by the Echo in your living room at home. The idea here is that guests will be able to ask Alexa for specific information, such as pool hours, as well as ordering room service or asking the concierge for dinner recommendations using just their voice.

Through Alexa for Hospitality, hotels can configure Alexa so that guests are able to control their various connected in-room gadgets, such as thermostats, TVs, and lights, as they would at home. According to Amazon, guests will soon be able to connect their own Amazon account to the Alexa-powered device in their room so they can access their music and audiobooks. This integration will be temporary, with the connection automatically cut once a guest checks out.

The first results of Amazon’s new hospitality program will kick off this summer at a number of Marriott International hotels, according to Amazon, though the company is opening invitations to all hospitality companies.

After decades of spending on technology to enhance staff abilities, hotels are finally looking up to the commercialization of advanced tech such as AI, so that hotel guests can enjoy value for money in terms of efficiency and luxury. This is not a replacement for humans, but is much wider and pervasive. Technology like Alexa can create more trust, and in the process also transform hotel processes, services and facilities.

Today, the hotel industry thrives on and rapidly adopts technological advancements that provide utmost customer satisfaction. Having an intelligent Alexa hotel is ‘the’ strategy that modern hotels need to surpass customer expectations. How? There are certain essential elements of Alexa that will make hotels intelligent, including digital assistance, voice-activated services and travel experience enhancers. From the customer’s personal choices to their tiniest of needs, this will help hotels offer carefully-planned assistance.

Travellers today love absolute control and flexibility in their travel experiences. A dedicated technology like Alexa that empowers customers’ stay, giving them the luxury to unlock their room, adjust room temperature, operate curtains, or even order food and drinks, is a sure win-win. Additionally, the Alexa Skill Set, a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa, will also help hotels with customization to deliver a unique experience. This will provide a differentiated experience by building a skill that lets guests naturally access property information, services, and amenities. We have anyway managed to become comfortable with voice assistants on-the-go, as well as at home. Alexa will simply help hotels recreate the same experiences and comfort.

The more you know your customer, the more better positioned it makes you to surpass their expectations and cater to every need. While hotels have already started making the pre-journey process(bookings) seamless, it is time to take a step further and assign AI the work of a dedicated chaperon, who will also make the stay more familiar and comfortable. Amazon’s Alexa is the breakthrough all hotel systems have been waiting for.

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Over the past decade, mobile has revolutionized the travel industry and is reshaping how every travel organization interacts with its travellers. However, there are bigger changes looming on the horizon, with the emergence of voice search, artificial intelligence and conversational messaging. Combined together, these technologies are reshaping the future of travel, and most importantly, travel agents.

Travel-meta search engine ixigo recently unveiled TARA (Travel Assistant and Recommendation Agent), a 100% AI-driven travel assistant for flights. She takes care of all your flight-related needs across discovery, research, planning, booking and trip management. TARA is exactly like the travel agent of the past, except that she responds instantly and is available 24×7. She has all flight-related information and deals at her fingertips, she is unbiased and knows your preferences, and she doesn’t sleep at night. Her aim is to make sure you simply focus on enjoying your trip. TARA also won the runner’s up award at the Phocuswright Conference this year.

Omniscient digital assistants, from Google Trips to Lola, are set to change the dynamics of travel. New apps are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to go beyond just helping travellers plan trips, to learning their preferences and even suggesting personalized itineraries. This is great news for consumers, who are going to benefit immensely in terms of convenience, but will it mean bad news for travel agents who are likely to lose traffic to these new assistants?

Ixigo co-founder and CTO Rajnish Kumar at the Phocuswright Conference 2017

Digital travel assistants provide users a single point of contact through which they can book trips, thus vastly narrowing down options, and hassles of connecting with different companies for their travel getaway. For instance, Expedia has partnered with Amazon to offer its services through the Alexa digital assistant, who allows users to book flights or call a cab through Amazon Echo. These tools allow travellers to make requests using more intuitive language and questions; a much more seamless experience than calling or getting on the website.

Moreover, digital assistants cover the entire travel experience. So instead of hotels or airlines sending individual notifications, these apps bring everything together and break the silo, thus bringing them closer to the one-point contact travel experience that passengers expect. Digitization has given them this choice in a big way.

Ixigo’s digital travel assistant TARA

For travel agents, these interfaces represent both a great opportunity and a threat. These conversational apps provide a new tool to resolve simple customer problems, so they can focus on more complicated requests. While they are perfect for today’s mobile environment, they will also require more back-end work to educate customers and provide the right responses.

Whether agents like it or not, consumer behavior will continue to change. The only question that remains is how should they adapt. The executives who manage to get it right will stand to profit the most. Using these AI softwares and platforms, and optimizing for their virtual assistants could be one solution. However, if they can provide a great user experience, they stand a strong chance of competing regardless of how it’s delivered.

Whatever the interaction model that travel agents choose, typing in a mobile web-browser is definitely not going to make the cut in a mobile-first future.

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Hotels, inns, and lodges – one of the oldest businesses that have survived the test of time. In the Middle Ages, inns and taverns were the only places for people to have food and drinks. Taverns then acquired the licence to host travellers for the night, and the concept of lodging came into existence.

As technology evolved, the industry had to undergo several changes like many others. Since the problem they were solving was essential and important, the industry thrived and continues to. Technology made its way into the workings of this business, and we now see the advent of an era where travellers cannot have a seamless experience with the hotel without the aid of technology. With technology evolving and guests gaining access to several social media platforms, it has become imperative for hotels to have a positive online presence, a brand recognition and provide a smooth stay experience. With a plethora of hotel options available online, ever changing prices, and the dynamic nature of customers’ needs, there is only one differentiator that separates hotels from one another – customer experience. Now it has become all the more important for hotels to provide superior customer experience – an experience that their visitors will remember long after they have left the premises.

With great technology, comes great data. As much as technology has eased the regular hotelier’s day to day operations, a greater problem looms – there is too much data! When visitors have a gazillion different places to post opinions about the hotel and their stay, how can the hotel then keep track of each and every feedback?

In such cases, if you are a hotelier, you’d resort to outsourcing your review management needs to an agency. This comes with its own set of challenges –

1. The replies that an agency posts to your beloved visitors’ reviews, are impersonal. They sound as if a robot threw up on the keyboard.
2. Since one agency works with more than one hotel chain, they take more time than is permissible to reply to a review, at times even as long as 15 to 20 days after the review first appeared!
3. The most pressing problem of all – you are not the one in control. Instead of actually understanding the underlying reasons behind customer grievances, or identifying any patterns that may be useful for your business, the agency just makes temporary face-saving measures.

The need of the hour is to use technology to analyse millions of customer data points and churn out intelligent insights – now! If there are 100 monthly visitors of a hotel and even 15 leave negative comments on a review website, which go un-replied for a week, research says that about 80 new potential customers will not visit the hotel after reading those reviews. That’s 80 customers lost!

With the advent of newer technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, we now see a new paradigm in understanding customer opinions – intelligently. An algorithm which can sift through thousands of your customers’ reviews, and identify patterns, identify what aspects of your business are most important to your customers, and highlight what areas of your business need attention. If you could tell a system early on, that aspects you want to measure are, say, ‘WiFi’, ‘Cleanliness’, ‘Staff Service’, and ‘Ambience’, then AI today has the power to identify sentences in thousands of reviews that exactly talk about these aspects, and then suggest ways to improve your service. The good thing is, that AI can be made to work like a human brain. You can seek information on new data pointers as required to identify problems and tackle them. One day you tell it to start looking for mentions of ‘hot water’ in your customers’ reviews / opinions, and you will be presented with all the issues or grievances related to the availability of hot water in your hotels’ rooms, along with week by week analysis and patterns.

(Also read: Amadeus arms DMOs with timely insights about travellers to remove the guesswork)

At Survaider, we built a powerful AI based solution to arm the modern day hotelier with the right set of tools to boost customer experience. The software, which is a quick plug-and-play solution, picks all reviews, posts and OTA mentions, social media, on-site feedback forms, email complaints, and every opinion that the guest leaves on any touchpoint, and all in real-time.
With the modern connected traveller, the data is readily available to act upon, yet we observed that not many were equipped to leverage it for improving the guest experience. Many hoteliers are willing to invest towards guest experience but don’t know where to start. We are bridging that gap by enabling hoteliers to draw actionable insights from the feedback and helping them work towards their business goals.

As the travel industry continues to grow, it will become even more important to make data-driven decisions and make them proactively. Customers trust a brand that listens to them and understands their needs. We have built Survaider so that hoteliers can take a major step in this direction without having to invest heavy resources.

Author

Madhulika is the co-founder and CTO of Survaider, a CX management solution for businesses. Apart from handling technology and product at Survaider, she has an interest in various things – product designing, writing, singing, and painting. She hails from Delhi, where she completed her engineering from DU. Post that, she started up Survaider after a few other entreprenuerial stints, purely because she wanted to solve a real problem of the industry – for hotels to be able to truly understand what their customers on the ground want.

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