A follow up to the WTM Thought Leaders Breakfast which I facilitated last November, I ran as a webinar in December 2017. The webinar was called ‘A I (Artificial Intelligence) meets Human Hospitality’ and once again hosted by SiteMinder, Revinate and IDeaS

During this global webinar which had over 400 registrations, I revealed what happened during the WTM Thought Leaders Breakfast and the insights and ideas generated from the hoteliers present.

At the WTM Thought Leaders Breakfast the audience were involved in a participative workshop. This involved live interactive polls and surveys. From this we were able to gauge their understanding and thoughts on who will be running our hotels in 25 years – humans or robots?

They were shown video clips of how robots are currently used in the hospitality industry. Then their understanding of Artificial Intelligence was gathered through producing an interactive word cloud using their own mobile devices.

Working in groups they looked at the different viewpoints of whether human hospitality would be enough to stop the robots from taking over.

Moving ahead 25 years taking in to account the use of technology to enhance the guest experience throughout the whole of their journey. The groups discussed what would be happening at the booking / pre-arrival stage, the arrival and check in stage and during the guests stay.

Their ideas were collated and these were then ranked to work out the top three ideas.

During the webinar these results were revealed and questions answered from the participants to delve in to the topic further. Some of the polls that were used at the Thought Leaders Breakfast were also given to the webinar registrants, to compare the results.

So what happens when A I (Artificial Intelligence) Meets Human Hospitality?

From both the Thought Leaders Breakfast event and the webinar, a white paper will be produced revealing all the results. This will be published at the end of January and will be translated in to 6 languages.

The white paper we will be answering the following questions:

• Who will be running our hotels in 25 years – humans or robots?
  • We take a glimpse at what happens when our hotels are run entirely by robots.
• Will human hospitality be enough to stop the robots from taking over?
  • Find out what our hoteliers thoughts are.
• How can hotels of the future embrace technology to enhance the guest experience?
  • Our hoteliers’ ideas of what could be happening in their hotels is revealed.
• What does this mean for Hoteliers?
  • Find out the next steps you should be taking.

A link is now available on this website to download the white paper that has been published.