How BWH Hotels Is Reimagining Hotel Tech & Taking On the AI Booking Shift

Glenn: Everybody at your hospitality. Friend Glenn here on the show floor at the hospitality show for. I talk to Bill Ryan, chief technology officer of Best Western. I want to thank our friends over at Axonify powering guest experiences through front line teams. Check them out at axonify. You guys are up to a lot of changes right now in technology. Man is so tough to keep up with. Know what’s it like going through the process of modernizing and reimagining that front desk experience for your teams out there? Yeah.

Bill: You know, so I’ve been in my role at BWH Hotels for just about a year at this point. So I’ve been looking across the entirety of the technology stack. So it was really great for us is we talked with a group of our hoteliers, we called them our governors, and we asked them, what are the top things that are challenging your frontline teams? And they gave us a number of things. One of them is training. Right. It’s so hard to onboard their staff, their it costs more for their staff every day. The other is around integrations with some of our back end systems, payments complexity. You know, there’s so much going on and we’re asking them to do more and more than ever right now. So these systems right Systems.

Glenn: Systems, I guess that are more intuitive. Yes. And it allows these digital natives, young people who grew up with the internet, not like me, to just do it. What comes naturally.

Bill: Right, exactly. It needs to be incredibly intuitive. And we just released a new PMS system, Auto Clark Atlas, and it has one day onboarding for the staff. Amazing. It takes all of the complications out of payments, so you don’t have to worry about missing any sort of charges. It is a game changer for our front desk staff.

Glenn: Wow. That’s that’s really cool. All right. So that’s going to be great because it’s going to help with getting them up to speed quicker. And I’ll also employ retention because a big part of this is making the employees feel engaged and like real team members. And if they can go through that and allow and you know, I’ve said it now, this might be the 10th time, the 10,000th time keeping human connections intact in our business. And I think this sort of thing leads to it. Absolutely.

Bill: You take away all of the complexity of the back end, and you free up your time to focus on that guest experience.

Glenn: Right. All right. So another way you focus on guest experience is I see that the way that people are going to be booking rooms is shifting, shifting dramatically and very quickly, maybe in ways that you folks don’t really understand yet at this time. How are you thinking about how guests are going to be booking in the future, and what are you doing to make sure that you can capture them?

Bill: Absolutely.

Glenn: When they’re thinking about vacationing or business.

Bill: Travel, there’s a seismic shift that is occurring right now within our industry. You could feel.

Glenn: It.

Bill: Under your feet for real. You can. And I’ve had so many great conversations with people around this topic just here. So there’s power that we as hotel suppliers have an opportunity to take back within this industry as AI search and Llms and chatbot ChatGPT and perplexity. That’s where searches are starting to initiate. It’s going to start to move away from the OTA, start to move away a little bit, even from your own websites. There’s a new channel that is starting to emerge, and we need to set ourselves up so that we can be discoverable within that.

Glenn: So this is both an opportunity and a wake up call. Yes. Because the industry did not take advantage of the growth and birth of the original internet, particularly in the post 911 era. So now it’s a chance to get in there. We know better, we’ve learned lessons, and now’s the opportunity for hotels to rethink that.

Bill: It absolutely is. And we need to band together as an industry so that we can be a formidable force. Right now. You’ve got the OTAs that have formed these partnerships with the LMS right now because they have scale, they’ve got volume to do it. We need to come together right now to take some of that control back and we can do this.

Glenn: Yeah. So how do you envision the future then?

Bill: I see the future as all of our availability, all of our inventory is being exposed in different types of ways. We’re going to move to MCP servers model context protocol. That’s a way that the LMS will interact directly with us as brands, and those bookings come straight to us. It increases our brand contribution and it increases the ways that we can communicate directly with our guests.

Glenn: Right. And franchisees or in this case, members are really looking for high brand contribution for reservations in order to make the relationship successful.

Bill: Absolutely. And we’re meeting our customers where they are if they want to search there, if they want to find us in those ways, fine. Let’s encourage that. That’s a good thing for us.

Glenn: All right, what if I only want to search in an old school book that I have to flip through? You know what?

Bill: Wherever the customer wants to go, if there’s a good ROI, we’re going to continue to love that. But it’s also like people ask, does that mean that the website goes away? Does the mobile app goes away? No, this is just a new channel. It’s a new engagement vehicle. It’s a new way for us to collect data. Right. And also to better personalize the experience in that form that is more convenient to them.

Glenn: I am being cheeky about the the books going away that went away for everybody. I think in like 2003, 2004, something like that, the latest. But the fact is technology does change. That was a form of technology. Now it’s different terms used to have one type of technology. Now it’s different and it gives you a chance to reinvent the industry, connect better with people and move everyone forward. Absolutely. Any final thoughts?

Bill: You know what? I’m just so excited to be here, excited about what’s going on within this space. And to everyone within the industry, you know, let’s continue to look. Let’s figure out how we take some of this power. Yes. Awesome. Thanks so much.

Glenn: I’m Glenn here. Are you. Like share. Subscribe. You know what to do. Bye. See ya.