Hotel Marketing With AI: How My Place Hotels Competes With Bigger Brands

Glenn: [00:00:00] Everybody at your hospitality. A friend, Glenn, I found Jeff Thomas, VP of marketing with my Place Hotels of America. So listen. Yes, sir. Big guys, they got all this marketing dollars. They could do virtually anything. You got to be scrappy. You got to be tough. You got to be inventive. I want to know how you’re thinking about the big picture with me.

Jeff: [00:00:18] Yeah, I like to. I like to say we we have to box above our weight class and we have to do things sometimes faster. We have to test more. We have to try new things. And we’ve really been leaning into AI for the last three years now. Early adopter we’ve been playing around with AI since the end of 2022. Really doing the typical marketing things, content ideation, optimization. We started playing around with visual content. And over that three year transformation, we’ve really developed an exceptional platform and operating platform for us to be able to manage from where we’re really touching all aspects of the marketing experience with, with, with, with AI.

Glenn: [00:00:55] So what do customers respond to?

Jeff: [00:00:58] They respond to fresh content. They respond to great marketing messages. They respond to immersive videos that have been freshly curated, uniquely curated and are very personal, meaning matching the persona and the expectations.

Glenn: [00:01:12] And that’s kind of where that AI component comes in as well.

Jeff: [00:01:14] And it helps us scale, Glenn, because one of the things we found was that, you know, to put a photographer on a plane to send them off to because we trust them, we know what they what they’re going to shoot. It’s great. We know that’s going to be a great product, but we just don’t have the scale. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the ability to execute that at that speed. So we’ve taken it back into the labs and we’ve worked on some platforms. Our our design team, our video production specialist does some great work, and we’re now producing visual content at scale using AI.

Glenn: [00:01:44] And yeah, I think that this is so important to be able to connect with the customer and have a dialogue with them on a regular basis. Now, I ran into you at that Hospitality Creators Summit, right? And I’m not trying to like sell myself, but I think it’s interesting that you’re, you’re starting to think about things differently. And here we’re, we filmed this during their conference and you really started to embrace that sort of thing. How are you thinking about different ways of engaging the customers that we haven’t seen before? Because you, you and only like one other company on the hotel side was there, which tells me that you’re doing something that they want to do but haven’t figured out yet.

Jeff: [00:02:24] Well, I think number one, we have to figure out how to place my place, our properties, and our experience in front of people using AI chatbots. If you’re on ChatGPT, you’re on cloud, you’re on Perplexity or Gemini. When you’re looking for an extended stay hotel or hotel with a kitchen, it’s pet friendly. That has a rate of less than 150 bucks. It’s got great guest reviews. Where do you go? You could type that into Google and you’ll probably get an AI overview. The good thing is we’ve set ourselves up for success here. We’ve optimized the content to get ready for this AI transformation. We’ve tested, we’ve learned, we’ve figured it out. We’re now using Agentic optimization to to optimize our websites at scale. So we really know those signals well. We’ve tested, we know there are certain signals that everyone’s aware of. There’s some things that we can do even more that are very specific to optimizing an AI, and that’s really helping us drive that traffic. And we’re now starting to see revenue attributed to AI as well.

Glenn: [00:03:21] That’s, that’s pretty cool. And this really, really just starting to get there, although I understand that amongst younger travelers, something like 45% are already going and asking their AI tools where they should stay and stuff like that. I recently did it for an upcoming conference we’re having. I’m like, I need a room within, I think, a half a mile of the convention center that has a balcony is inexpensive, but not cheap. Right?

Jeff: [00:03:48] No, exactly. And that’s, it’s think of it. Ai is incredibly personal. Every prompt that’s entered by a different person has the chance of having a different result because that AI platform knows you and they know how to, to be able to deliver content and recommendations based on what they know about you.

Glenn: [00:04:06] Great for me. Much hotter for you.

Jeff: [00:04:09] So I think we have to stick to our core and who we are and connect with those guests that are looking for something specific that connect with our brand. We don’t want to be something that we’re not. You know, we there’s amenities that we don’t offer. Yeah. We don’t want to be in the consideration for that because that will only diminish the experience of that guest. So we know what we do well and we know our guests. Guest reviews really support that an effective way. Those signals are really positive. But you know, we want to make sure that we’re accurately educating where we’re located, what we offer, the great experience and the great guest service that our our team has and be able to welcome them hopefully for the first time into my place.

Glenn: [00:04:48] How long does it take you to retire a formerly brilliant marketing idea?

Glenn: [00:04:53] How long does it take?

Jeff: [00:04:54] Because they could only last for so long, right? You get this. This guy opens up and you get that ray of sunshine. And it works for a while, but then it dissipates.

Jeff: [00:05:03] I think, you know, you want to make sure you don’t dwell too long and, and, and think that this is the only thing that you need to focus on tests, learn, validate and either productionize it or forget it. You know, one of the things we’re doing at right now is we’re actually aligning on one North star for AI. We’re going to go with the single platform. We’re going to start, you know, obviously utilizing at scale across the enterprise. And that’s what we found is that there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of distraction, a lot of platforms, a lot of new things that are popping up. And it’s easy to get drawn into, oh, there’s a shiny, there’s a new shiny tool that we want to try out. Don’t get distracted. Focus on your North Star. Whatever your platform is, educate, use it, you know, extensively. And then most importantly, make sure you’re leading your team into this as well, because paying it forward to your team, getting them involved and getting them engaged is only going to not only help your efforts, but it’s going to help them and their growth.

Glenn: [00:06:02] Yeah. That’s right. Ai is a great tool to get us all connected as people, not silo our experience. Yeah, this is real fun talking to you. It’s always really appreciate it. We appreciate you for making it all the way to the end. So do me a favor, like share, subscribe. So for Jeff and myself, Glenn, thanks for watching. See you next time. Right here on No Vacancy. Bye, everybody. Bye.