Natural Language AI Just Changed Hotel Management Forever

Glenn: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend Glenn here, and I’m with my new friend Steve Marino, the VP of IT and Hotel systems with PM Hotel Group, an awesome management company. But first I want to thank my friends over at Unifocus. Unifocus, Workforce Management Redefined. Please check them out unifocus.com.All right, so I’ve been traveling around the last couple of years and everyone’s talking about AI, AI AI but I’m feeling, Steve, we’re finally at the point now where it’s no longer theory. You’re actually applying things. And I’m curious to talk to you today a little bit about how you’re thinking about AI and how you’re thinking about how it’s going to help define your business in the future and create a differentiating factor that’s going to get owners excited to work with your management.

Steve: [00:00:46] Sure. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. At PM hotel Group, we’re about 75 to 80 hotels constantly growing, trying to attract as many owners as we can.

Glenn: [00:00:55] And let me say he doesn’t know the exact number because really the group keeps growing. And then sometimes you get short term contracts and they leave. So it’s always changing.

Steve: [00:01:02] That’s right. Yeah.

Glenn: [00:01:03] So please.

Steve: [00:01:03] Continue. We got the best hotels. Yeah. To that point though, AI has always been a conversation with owners, especially in the last 12 to 24 months, as you noted. And I think there’s a lot of confusion out there. What we’re doing is actually trying to bring that to the table to be a competitive differentiator for us and our owners. And specifically, we’re going to use AI over top of our business intelligence tools to actually provide our owners the ability to look directly at their hotels, make in the moment decisions about the data to ensure that profitability is where it needs to be. We see that as something that we’re not only doing today, but we’re going to do more of tomorrow, and it’ll be part of our pitch for owners to get more hotels. And so we’re going to use our BI platform. We’re going to do AI on top of it. Simple things like even natural query search, where we’re going to allow owners to talk to the data or allow our own executives to talk to the data.

Glenn: [00:01:51] All right. Now I’m getting now I’m getting excited because this is the first time I’ve heard something like this. Usually, I say, since the lodging conference last year, I was talking to a lot of the CEOs of the companies and we were talking about you know, a genetic connection to the internet and like how customers are going to talk to AI in order to do stuff. This is the first I’m hearing about owners utilizing it. Yeah, that’s really an interesting point of view. So could you go into a little bit more detail about how they’ll find more success for the stuff that they’re looking to learn more about while they’re overseeing what you guys are doing, managing their hotels day to day? Sure makes sense.

Steve: [00:02:27] Yeah, I think a lot of it has come from a reactive perspective for owners to a proactive. And so rather than rely upon maybe our own executives to provide reports on a month and weekend perspective.

Glenn: [00:02:39] Which they’ll still do, I’m sure.

Steve: [00:02:40] They’ll still do. And we’re going to allow them direct access to the data and or our own internal execs and operations, etc.. And on our business development side as well to talk to the data. And by that, I mean, you know, give me my cost per occupied room across these hotels for the last three weeks and give them the information that way rather than trying to figure out how do I, how do I can report, how do I run the report? Who do I get the report from? And so we’re really just trying to empower them to allow them to make decisions that make their hotels and us more profitable. Yeah.

Glenn: [00:03:09] And the fact of the matter is that a lot of owners, I’m not saying specifically your owners, but they aren’t hoteliers. They’re more investor class people, and they don’t understand how to utilize all of the systems to find the exact information that they’re looking for. Instantly, they can get it. But this takes away that friction.

Steve: [00:03:27] It does.

Glenn: [00:03:28] Which we always talk about the the guest hotel relationship, but not the owner management company relationship and removing the friction. So that’s a really great example of that. Yes. How else are you thinking about making your owners lives easier to get them closer to your operation?

Steve: [00:03:44] I think a lot of it has to do with additional deals. And so on the BD side, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get AI to assist us in finding the right products, the right underwriting, the right target assets for us to manage. We don’t want to manage just anything and everything that comes our way. We want to find the right owners who find the value in what it is that we do, and we can show and differentiate our value versus other hotel management companies. And so that’s a little bit more on the future side of it. But as far as today, we’re going to use a lot of our AI tools against our current business intelligence platform.

Glenn: [00:04:13] So now that we’ve talked about that owner side, I am curious as to how guests are thinking about it too. Right. How real is this? And you know, where do you see it’s coming from? And quite frankly, in the last two weeks as we’re recording this, I feel like most of the major hotel brands have now released some sort of customer focused tool that allows you just to speak to, to AI to get what you want. So that’s got to be changing the way you guys think about the dynamics of your customer guests relationship.

Steve: [00:04:43] Yeah, absolutely. And so we do about 65% of our portfolio is branded and the other 35% independent. So on the branded side, you mentioned IHG came out with an announcement, Marriott came out with an announcement. I think a lot of it is actually happening behind the scenes even faster than people realize. And so auto attendance or you know, when you make a phone call within the hotel down to the front desk, a lot of that is pretty much AI today, right? I think the booking process is what IHG and others are going to focus on, which makes a lot of sense, you know, narrow down the search. Yeah. But I think what guests are looking to do is this is no different from any other technology is they’re used to doing it already in their personal lives. Right. And they want to bring that into their professional.

Speaker 3: [00:05:17] I’m scheduling because I find there’s a disconnect between a lot of times between.

Glenn: [00:05:21] Hoteliers relying on how they do things as a, as a guide to how the hotel should be doing things right? Yes. So that’s that’s really interesting to me. Well, so what’s really cool is how you’re thinking a couple of years ahead. And a couple of years ago, we weren’t thinking about this at all. Right. But you were. Yes. Right.

Steve: [00:05:44] For sure. Yeah.

Glenn: [00:05:45] So how has all of this changed? And what possibilities do you see now that maybe we weren’t even discussing a couple of years ago?

Steve: [00:05:53] It’s a great point. I think several years back, leaders within our company knew I was going to be a differentiator. Aggressive bozinovski and team are certainly well ahead of the curve on that front. And again, we want to scale appropriately with the right hotels and the right owners. I think what’s happening faster than anything is the natural query, the thing we talked about earlier, which is just allowing somebody to talk to the data and get the results they need in their own terms. And being able to do that without having to go through a proliferation of reports. I think beyond that, it’s going to allow us to basically go to a pitch deck and go to a an ownership group and in the use of AI and provide data that others aren’t going to be able to provide. And that could be forecasts, it could be performance, etc.. And we’re going to be in a position to, I think, actually put ourselves and differentiate ourselves and put ourselves ahead of others when it comes to landing deals.

Glenn: [00:06:39] The one thing I really like about the tone and tenor of this conversation is you’re talking about empowering people, not replacing people.

Steve: [00:06:47] Oh, that’s a great point. Yeah. We don’t think of it that way. We don’t think of them actually AI replacing anything that we’re doing. It’s really to enhance but also empower the relationship. And so, you know, the more we have interactions with owners, the better for us because we’re having a dialogue about the product and profitability rather than maybe sometimes them being a little scared of the conversation, what to ask, how to ask, should I ask? And so the more conversation and the more AI allows us to have that natural dialogue like you and I are having now, the better for everyone.

Glenn: [00:07:15] Great. And I’m glad that he thought this was a natural dialogue. I’m actually computer generated. So pretty, pretty impressive. Anything else that you want to say?

Steve: [00:07:22] No, I really appreciate the opportunity.

Glenn: [00:07:24] I really appreciate it too. I love getting to talk to someone who I haven’t spoken to before. After 30 years in the business, it doesn’t happen that very often. Steve, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being here. Please like, share, subscribe. Have an amazing day. Love you guys. Bye.