News Briefs

BirchStreet Systems, a leading provider of procure-to-pay automation solutions developed specifically for the hospitality sector, announced the rollout of the ReactorNet solution across Trump Hotels’ global portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts, as part of a recently signed three-year agreement.

Trump Hotels plans to leverage the full suite of integrated solutions, including eProcurement, accounts payable workflow, inventory management, and Capex, as a strategic move to enhance operational efficiency, data consolidation and streamlining for Trump Hotel locations worldwide. The implementation of ReactorNet will begin at Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland, Doonbeg in March of this year.

The global rollout is continuing with the Trump International Hotel & Tower® Chicago, and further deployments are scheduled throughout 2024 at Trump® National Doral Miami and Trump International Hotel and Tower® New York. Final deployments to be completed in 2025 include the Trump Hotel corporate offices, as well as Trump® International Hotel Las Vegas and Trump Turnberry® in Scotland.

As part of BirchStreet’s commitment to customer success, Trump Hotels’ staff will receive comprehensive in-person training at each property location to ensure that all stakeholders are thoroughly trained and comfortable with the new systems and processes.

Trump Hotels leadership ultimately chose the ReactorNet solution due to its high competitiveness in terms of value and ease of use. Another key factor was the automation of the PO lifecycle, streamlining workflows and improving productivity.

Anita Watts, Principal, BirchStreet Systems, commented, "Data consolidation is a cornerstone for modern hospitality management. By integrating various operational needs into a single system, we provide hotels with the ability to manage resources more efficiently, reduce duplication and gaps, and make data-driven decisions. This partnership with Trump Hotels showcases our dedication to delivering comprehensive and customizable procurement solutions that address the specific challenges faced by the modern hospitality industry."

Katherine Elardo, VP of Global Procurement at Trump Hotels, commented, "The integration of the ReactorNet solution is significant for Trump Hotels as it allows us to consolidate our various operational needs into one streamlined system, greatly enhancing our productivity and data management capabilities."

HRS, a global corporate lodging and payment technology platform, published a new report providing data and trends on the progress companies and their hotel suppliers are making as they strive to reduce the carbon emissions tied to corporate guest stays. HRS, which works with one-third of the Fortune 500 on some element of their lodging and/or meeting program, has built a unique vantage point on this topic. Launched only three years ago, HRS’ Green Stay Initiative is used by 85 percent of the world’s relevant corporate-travel focused hotels, covering 600+ chains across more than 175 countries.

The first-of-its-kind report – titled the State of Sustainability in Corporate Travel – explores HRS’ comprehensive Green Stay database to uncover multiple findings.  Across the wealth of metrics, it is now clear that the marriage of advanced procurement and booking technologies – embedded with detailed sustainability figures from hotels – is driving the desired outcome: corporations working with HRS have collectively reduced the carbon emissions tied to their hotel stays by 27 percent through the first half of 2024.

This result is more striking when contrasted against the fact that 30 percent of the emissions tied to an average business trip today are hotel sourced – up from 21 percent in pre-pandemic measurements. Given this growth and contrasted against the limited scenarios for emission reduction that air travel segments offer, corporations have a considerably broader range of opportunities to reduce trip-related emissions via lodging. The average hotel search presents 300+ hotel options to travelers going to most cities; corporations leveraging data and preferencing options in corporate booking technologies can effectively “nudge” their travelers to select more sustainable hotel options.

Companies Can Save on Hotel Costs AND Reduce Their Carbon Emissions

As emission reduction rose on the list of priorities for managed hotel programs, in too many scenarios travel procurement leaders were led to believe that staying at sustainable hotels would cost more. With HRS’ State of Sustainability Report, there is now clear evidence that this does not need to be the case. When contrasting the rates of hotels against their sustainability rating, the Green Stay database shows that, on average, the 25 percent most efficient hotels offered average daily rates that were 17 percent less than the 25 percent of most polluting hotels.

The correlation between a hotel’s progress on reducing their emissions, capacity to digitally provide transparency on their sustainable attributes, and offer better prices has multiple cascading benefits. As noted in the report, government directives are spurring companies to act to reduce emissions across their operations and avoid potential fiscal penalties. For example, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability and Reporting Directive (CSRD) will affect more than 50,000 companies by 2026. At the same time, companies and their hotel procurement strategies are constantly evolving, balancing the priority of securing the most value for their lodging spend with the need to travel more sustainably.

Business Travelers Across Traveler Personas Are Booking More Sustainable Hotels 

HRS did this exhaustive study across its global client base, measuring completed stays in the first half of 2024 in contrast with the carbon emission metrics of the specific properties they stayed at. The granularity of the Green Stay data, overlaid with booking data, delivers insights that can substantially advance the unique goals of each corporate lodging program.

When comparing those figures to the same six-month period in 2023, there are several noteworthy findings illustrating the impact companies are having as they leverage HRS’ procurement and booking automation in conjunction with more transparent reporting of sustainability data by hotel suppliers:  

• Frequent business travelers that compiled more than 50 room nights per year reduced the emissions tied to their hotel choice by 14 percent;
• Infrequent travelers (10 to 50 room nights per year) reduced emissions by 32 percent; and
• One-off hotel guests (less than 10 room nights annually) reduced emissions by 26 percent.

The latest Green Stay data also shows the resounding booking and procurement benefits for hotels participating in the Green Stay Initiative. As noted in the report:

• Building off projections based on the first half of 2024 and historical trends, hotels participating in Green Stay are projected to see an additional 2.5 million more room nights booked over 2023 totals over the rest of this year.
• These figures are clearly having a ripple effect as hotel procurement exercises for 2025 begin to take place. Looking across all the RFPs HRS has orchestrated on behalf of its global client base so far this year, hotels participating in the Green Stay Initiative are 22 percent more likely to win volume than those properties who do not. 

“The results in this groundbreaking report are unquestionably promising from a global perspective,” said HRS CEO Tobias Ragge. “As transparency improves and technologies advance – giving corporations specific property-level metrics they need for procurement and reporting, and travelers the digital push to select the sustainable hotels recommended by their travel team – it’s clear that use of automation can help influence all parties to take clear action towards the worthy goals of the Paris Agreement and the EU’s CSRD. Beyond that, this report provides a clarion call to the hotel community. There is no longer a doubt that investments into more sustainable operations offer the promise of winning more corporate room nights and tighter relationships with sustainability-focused corporate clients.”

In addition to findings tied to business traveler behavior and more insights from HRS’ Green Stay database, the report covers a wide range of regional and global issues, including potential gains and losses for companies as they seek to comply with evolving regulations. Case studies from prominent hotel chains and two trailblazing corporate hotel programs are included as well.  

Life House, an independent hotel management company, announced the spin-out of its software business unit into a new independent business, Diamo. This strategic move allows both companies to reinforce their respective core missions. Life House will strengthen its commitment to delivering local, personalized hospitality experiences while maintaining a strong emphasis on financial returns. Whereas Diamo will intensify its efforts in leveraging technology to make advanced revenue management strategies, along with high-return digital marketing tactics, accessible to independent lodging properties.

In a complex and expert-driven revenue landscape, many independent hoteliers lack the time, capital, or expertise to implement revenue strategies that maximize their financial performance. Diamo aims to bridge this gap with a comprehensive suite of products that optimize every stage of the guest booking journey.

“Growing from within a hotel management company, we’ve seen firsthand the complexity that time-strapped hoteliers face in maximizing revenue performance at their properties,” said James Kay, CEO of Diamo. “The +400,000 smaller independents globally have been underserved by solutions that address the holistic revenue problem. With Diamo, we aim to empower independent hoteliers with a simple platform that unlocks a holistic and advanced revenue management strategy that was previously out of reach. We’ve seen our solutions drive a 35% increase in revenue while significantly lowering OTA commissions, and we’re excited to bring this value to more lodging properties around the world.”

Diamo’s suite of products delivers an all-in-one solution to address the challenges independent hoteliers face in maximizing their revenue. Diamo’s unique platform earned the “2024 RMS Innovation of the Year” award from the TravelTech Breakthrough Awards.

The products have been meticulously developed and tested over the past several years, proving to drive positive revenue outcomes across North America, Europe, and Asia. The offerings include:

• Expert Digital Marketing: Services such as SEM, Metasearch, and OTA sponsored placements designed to increase visibility and bookings.
• Conversion-Optimized Website Templates: Beautifully designed, brand-aligned websites that drive direct bookings.
• Custom Booking Engine: A cohesive and upsell-focused booking platform that integrates seamlessly with the hotel’s brand.
• AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing Engine: An effective, yet simple, tool that automatically adjusts rates based on real-time demand, updating prices every hour for the next 365 days.

With Diamo’s specialized focus, the company is set to further innovate and expand its offerings to meet the evolving needs of hotels, B&Bs, hostels, and other lodging properties globally.

Life House remains committed to advancing the management and operations of its growing portfolio, refining its technology infrastructure to streamline and personalize the hospitality experience while ensuring robust financial returns.

“The decision to establish Diamo as an independent business sharpens our focus on becoming the leading operator for independent hotels,” said Chris Cave, CEO of Life House. “We are confident that under James’s leadership, Diamo is poised to revolutionize revenue management, while Life House dedicates itself to redefining the guest experience and the essence of boutique hotel management—beyond revenue. Diamo will remain a cornerstone for our hotel management clients, and we are excited to see it push the boundaries of hospitality software.”

The spin-off of Diamo follows a 25% increase in Life House’s management portfolio over the past year, with 5 additional properties scheduled to open by the year’s end.

For more information about Diamo and its suite of revenue management solutions, please visit www.diamo.ai.

UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, workforce management, and culture solutions, today announced that Aimbridge Hospitality, a leading global hospitality management company and trusted operator of distinctive independent hotels as well as some of the world’s most recognized hotel brands — including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, and Wyndham — is building a great place to work with the AI-powered UKG Pro^® suite through flexible, gig-like experiences that allow its 45,000 hourly U.S. employees to pick up shifts when and where they want.

“We compete for talent with the Ubers of the world, where people can decide when and where they work and set their own schedules. We are always keeping a pulse on the needs and preferences of our associates, and we set out to ‘gigify’ our workforce a few years ago to better compete for talent and become a more flexible employer,” said Ann Christenson, chief human resources officer at Aimbridge Hospitality. “With UKG already in use for HR and payroll, it was a seamless process to add advanced scheduling to our UKG suite and transform the way our people work — and especially to attract the next generation of workers.”

In an industry challenged by labor shortages and high turnover rates but where frontline workers are the backbone of business operations, Aimbridge rolled out flexible scheduling to its 24x7 workforce, giving people control of their schedules and work-location preferences through intelligent shift scheduling. Employees immediately began to self-schedule, swap shifts, and pick up open shifts across hotels through the UKG Pro mobile app, resulting in better work-life balance and improved employee satisfaction for their people, earning the hospitality giant a 2023 UKG Innovation Award.

According to a forthcoming global study on the frontline workforce by the UKG Workforce Institute, Aimbridge is ahead of the hospitality industry in offering flex scheduling, with nearly half (47%) of global employees in 2024 saying flexible/self-scheduling is highly desirable.

“Since we launched flex scheduling, more than 12,000 employees — about 30% of our hourly workforce — have traded shifts across our 1,100 U.S. properties, and that number continues to grow,” said Christenson. “We’ve given the power to our people, with opportunities to pick up shifts at any of our Aimbridge-managed properties in their area. The power of UKG’s solutions gives Aimbridge associates more choices to work their preferred hours and earn additional pay to support the other areas of their lives, which was important to us.”

Beyond creating more empowering and flexible options for employees, Aimbridge saw an opportunity to dramatically reinvent how it communicates with employees at its corporate, frontline property, and management levels through UKG Talk — a mobile communications platform in the UKG Pro suite that helps organizations build a culture of belonging through connection and collaboration.

“We rely on our General Managers to lead their properties and cascade messages down to their frontline employees,” said Christenson. “Every associate has access to UKG, and the ability to use the communications platform in UKG, where employees are already accessing their schedules, timecards, paystubs, and time-off requests, is extremely valuable. With UKG Talk, all of our communications are streamlined, leading to stronger operations and a more consistent, reliable, and enjoyable communications experience for our frontline employees.”

Another area Aimbridge plans to use UKG technology to more effectively communicate with employees is around paid time off (PTO). As a multi-state organization with union and non-union workers, as well as a diverse collection of hotel verticals housed in its Full Service and Select Service divisions, Aimbridge offers a wide range of PTO options to employees and plans to leverage UKG Bryte™, an AI-powered assistant in the UKG Pro suite that uses GenAI, to help guide employees, managers, and leaders to be more transparent about those policies.

“Our associates want to know they can get information they need from our HR team, and with 45,000 hourly workers, we need the right systems to support each and every individual,” said Christenson. “Initially, we had planned to build a chatbot to help answer questions more quickly, and the functionality is already available with UKG Bryte. Having a partner who can anticipate our needs and is always there with the right solutions at the right time truly speaks to the value of our UKG partnership.”

“At the end of the day, we want our associates focused on delivering great experiences for people, no matter what their reason is for traveling,” added Christenson. "When hospitality is done right, people are guest focused. We don’t want our workforce focused on the payroll cycle, their timecards, or any of those back-of-the-house functions. UKG does all that for us, freeing up our people to focus on providing the exceptional guest services we are known for.”

“Frontline workers make up the vast majority of today’s workforce and are crucial to keeping the global economy running, which is why our customers are hyper-focused on providing these vital employees with great workplace experiences,” said Jennifer Morgan, CEO at UKG. “By offering flexible and adaptable work schedules, organizations like Aimbridge Hospitality are signaling to their people that they care about their wellbeing, which inspires workers to show up every day, ready to provide high-quality service to every guest who walks through their doors.”

Mobi.ai, a human collaborative AI company focused on delivering transformational customer experiences for the travel industry, today announced the launch of its industry-first search and discovery technology, Mobi Intent Driven Search (IDS). Mobi IDS combines simple, natural language search with generative AI, Mobi's proprietary content store of 40M+ fully enriched points of interest around the world, and Mobi's advanced AI capabilities to deliver “best match” destinations, accommodations and experiences for guests of travel, tourism and hospitality companies.

AI is upending the industry and fundamentally changing how travel companies are interacting with customers. A recent report, The Promise of Travel in the Age of AI, produced by McKinsey and Skift Research, found that organizations that take advantage of the latest technological advancements “have the potential to see a 15 to 25 percent earnings improvement.”

“Search is changing in a big way with major browsers and most online travel agencies (OTA) embracing large language models like ChatGPT to offer natural language search,” said Mobi CEO and founder Anna Jaffe. “At Mobi, we leverage generative AI and LLMs to power natural language capabilities and understand guest travel intents. We then use a multimodal approach, combining our proprietary content with advanced planning and optimization AI, to deliver fast, accurate recommendations that meet guests' specific requirements and desires."

Mobi IDS ingests, cleans and structures data from multiple sources to provide real-time and accurate information about anything and everything surrounding any location or property, from dining and transportation options to activities, attractions, wildlife and more. This unlocks the ability to offer experience-led searches and provide specific recommendations for any customer query.

By enabling guests to ask personal questions with natural language, guests will share incredible insight into their likes, dislikes and behavior. These personal details can then be used to improve brands’ communications and marketing tactics. Mobi IDS can even integrate with client loyalty systems and booking engines to drive engagement and increase revenue capture.

“Most travelers know what they want to do on their next vacation, they simply don’t know where to go to pursue their passions,” said Mobi’s VP of Product Harriet Brown, who worked on the team that built and scaled the product behind Google Flights. “With IDS, hospitality companies don’t need to predict what a customer might want, they can listen to their intentions and provide a highly tailored recommendation of destination, property and activities to create their ideal adventure. This deep personalization will delight and inspire customers, and go a long way in building emotional loyalty.”

The basic implementation of Mobi IDS can be completed in just six weeks with custom enrichment of all client properties completed over the next two months. “Getting started with Mobi IDS is easy,” said Peng Yu, Mobi CTO and co-founder. “We’ve built a data pipeline capable of ingesting unstructured or structured data of any kind. We can accommodate any business logic or customer rules in configuration and we have a ready-made testing environment. This infrastructure is designed to get our clients from inspiration to implementation to value as quickly as possible.”

To learn more about Mobi’s Intent Driven Search product or book a meeting, visit mobi.ai/solutions/IDS. The tech will also be demonstrated at Destination AI in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 26, Hotel Technology Forum 2024 at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. from Nov. 18-20, and The Phocuswright Conference 2024 in Phoenix from Nov 19-21.

Seventy percent of consumers would take their business elsewhere after just one frustrating experience with AI-supported customer service,  according to a new survey from Acquire BPO, a provider of customer experience and business process outsourcing.

As companies increasingly turn to AI-powered customer service to reduce costs and increase efficiency, they risk alienating a large portion of their customer base if the customer experience is compromised. Companies only have one shot at getting it right, underlining the importance of mapping out a strong AI deployment strategy.

The 2024 AI in Customer Service Survey was conducted for Acquire BPO by the third-party survey platform Pollfish to explore consumer sentiment insights and how companies can proactively map out their AI customer experience strategies. Pollfish surveyed the experiences of 600 U.S. consumers aged 18+ who contacted a company for support issues over the past year.

Key findings include:

• Consumers are 2.5X more positive about their experience chatting with humans versus AI-powered bots.
• Half of consumers feel negatively about companies relying more on AI for customer support, citing downsides such as the lack of personal touch, decreased accuracy and longer resolution times.
• Consumers are willing to put their money behind their preferences, with 57% of chatbot fans saying they’ve chosen a service or product because they knew it offered chatbot support, and 72% of those with a human preference saying the availability of human customer support factored into their buying decisions.
• Many chatbot fans would rather complete an unpleasant or inconvenient task instead of speaking to a human customer support agent, with 29% saying they’d rather file their taxes, 29% saying they’d rather help a friend move out of a 6th floor apartment with no elevator, and 26% saying they’d rather clean the toilet.
• 40% of consumers are confident in AI’s ability to handle simple issues as well as a human, and 49% said they’d feel more comfortable using AI-powered support if they had the ability to switch to a human agent at any time.

To maximize AI’s benefits while avoiding its pitfalls, Acquire BPO advises that companies use it judiciously for the right tasks–and do the same for human agents as well.

• Don’t be afraid to use AI to address simple requests. 40% of consumers were confident in AI’s ability to handle simple issues as well as a human, presenting an easy opportunity for companies to streamline a portion of their support workload.
• Use AI to reference past issues–but don’t go too far in predicting future issues. 61% of survey respondents liked the idea of AI remembering past issues in order to streamline future contact with customer support, however 50% responded negatively to AI being used to predict problems before they happened.
• Use AI to escalate issues. 55% of consumers responded positively to knowing that AI could detect frustration with sentiment analysis and help route them to a resource or human agent to help with more complex issues.
• Provide clear paths for customers to request a human agent. 49% of customers said they’d feel more comfortable using AI-powered support if they had the ability to switch to a human agent at any time.

"Unlocking the power of AI is essential for companies to gain a competitive edge, however the future of exceptional customer service requires striking the right balance between AI and human support,” said Scott Stavretis, CEO of Acquire BPO. “By carefully mapping out an experience that blends AI and human support seamlessly, brands can meet customers where they are and deliver consistently outstanding service across all touchpoints."

Visit the 2024 AI in Customer Service Survey at Acquire BPO’s website for the complete survey results.