At this point, it’s safe to assume if AI is not already implemented in an industry, it soon will be. And as use of the tech becomes all the more proliferated, experts have said people will become lonelier—and as a result, crave genuine human interaction all that much more.
Enter the hospitality industry, built entirely around creating memorable experiences and ensuring guests feel at home, even from afar. As the industry grapples with implementing AI to cut down on booking logistics and payment systems, industry experts believe it’ll make the guest experience more personalized, and help out those checking in at the end.
Justifying one’s job
Richard Valtr, the founder of Mews, a cloud-based property management system valued at $2.5 billion and used by over 15,000 properties worldwide, grew up working the front desk at his family’s boutique hotel in Prague. His hatred for the industry’s clunky legacy software is what led him to build Mews in the first place.
“Before, your work was basically doing the checklist,” he told Fortune at the Mews Unfold conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday. “What’s really nice about AI is that it can do that checklist for you now. So, what are you going to do to actually justify your job?”
Valtr sees the justification of one’s job as a benefit of AI, not a doomsday threat that has been brandished about by even the leaders of prominent AI companies. If the scheduling, the revenue optimization, the routine messaging, and the operational bookkeeping are handled by intelligent systems, then hotel staff are freed to do the thing they were supposedly hired to do in the first place: make guests happy, anticipate needs, have a real conversation, notice the thing no algorithm would catch, and namely, make guests feel at home.
Valtr said the current generation of AI tools is analogous to what Microsoft Office was 20 or 30 years ago, saying it won’t take your job but change, if not ameliorate, how you do it.
“It’s not going to do something for you,” he said. “But the nature of what that work is basically is just changing.”
The two-speed hotel
For budget and economy hotels, which Valtr said may already run with skeleton crews, AI is primarily about automation and survival: chatbots that handle pre-arrival questions, upsell rooms, and respond to reviews at 11 p.m. Hotels using AI chatbots are reporting 20–35% higher conversion rates on direct booking inquiries compared to static web forms. Automated messaging, contactless check-in, and dynamic pricing systems that adjust rates in real time based on demand signals. It allows these operations to do more with fewer people and still offer a swallowable price point.
For luxury and upper-upscale properties, AI use might help these hotels employ more people, not fewer, and redeploy them entirely. If AI absorbs the operational complexity (scheduling, inventory management, and routine guest requests), then staff can be repositioned as guides, local experts, and genuine hosts.
“In five-star hotels, you might want to actually employ way more people,” Valtr said, “which means that in order to make sure that they’re acting as guides or assistants, you really need to boost your revenues.”
The tech enables the premium experience, which justifies the premium price. And both models, lean automation and rich augmentation, depend on AI handling the checklist so humans can do the work that only humans can do.
The Roger Federer test
Valtr’s approach with AI is addressing each guest’s needs to be as seamless as possible—and he has an ace analogy for it.
“What would happen if Roger Federer came to this hotel, but there’s 60 rooms, so what if Roger Federer was staying in every single room? A VIP guest never needs to actually worry about their luggage, they don’t really need to worry about how they’re getting from place to place, they just turn up and they perform,” he said. “They don’t need to carry their own tennis rackets or anything like that. And I feel like that should be where we get to with AI, where every single thing just seamlessly is kind of orchestrated.”
The concept of “Intelligent Guest Profiles,” or combining data from property management systems, point-of-sale platforms, and loyalty programs to build a living picture of each guest’s preferences, is gaining traction. The idea is that when a returning guest checks in, the system already knows they prefer a high floor, drink oat milk lattes, and asked for extra pillows last time. The staff doesn’t need to ask since they can just deliver it.
Think of it as being a regular at your local bar, where the bartender sets down your normal drink as soon as you enter the joint. However, Valtr thinks most hotels are still nowhere near this.
Hotels don’t know where they are
“Hotels are unbelievably unaware of where they are,” he said. “So much of the time they don’t know where the guests are going to have dinner.”
According to Mews’ own revenue management data, the No. 1 factor driving a guest’s willingness to pay a premium is location. It’s the one thing a hotel can’t change, and the one advantage that should be easiest to leverage. Yet most properties treat their neighborhood like a static backdrop, with a laminated card of restaurant recommendations and a concierge who knows a few spots.
Valtr’s vision is that AI should turn every hotel into a hyper-local concierge. A business traveler looking for a lunch spot should get a different recommendation from a couple arriving for a romantic weekend, and those suggestions should be ready before check-in. Hotels should be brokering access to local restaurants, events, and experiences, making guests feel less like tourists and more like insiders.
“Everyone, when they come somewhere, they want to feel like a local,” he said. “It’s like I go to my local pub, and the person that knows me from behind the bar will be like, yeah, sure, you can sit there.”
Hotels have never been able to replicate that feeling at scale. AI, and specifically—the ability to combine guest data with real-time local intelligence—might make it possible.
It’s also fitting into how guests discover hotels and local experiences in itself. Guests are increasingly finding where to stay and eat through conversational AI assistants, generative search summaries, and recommendation engines embedded in Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com. Hotels that can’t surface in those AI-mediated conversations, and can’t deliver the personalized, location-aware experience once a guest arrives, risk irrelevancy.
Rethinking loyalty
Most programs treat points as discounts: Stay enough nights, and earn a free one. Valtr argued they should be treated as currencies, and the real play is expanding where and how those currencies can be spent. If Hilton knows you’re a Knicks fan, they shouldn’t just offer you a discounted room. They should proactively offer you a hotel-plus-tickets package in Oklahoma City, because the Knicks are playing there and you’ll need somewhere to stay.
“Those types of things actually truly create moments of magic,” he said. “That brand wants to look after me, because they know who I am, and they want to think for me.”
AI has the ability to connect those dots: Travel preferences, sports fandom, dining habits, spending patterns, means offering guests proactive and personalized deals before the guest even thinks to ask. Some hotel groups are already moving this direction, Valtr said. Marriott has been expanding where its Bonvoy currency can be used. Accor’s loyalty program ties into experiences beyond the property.
Valtr drew a parallel to Uber. Once you experience hailing a car from your phone, going back to flagging down a taxi and fumbling for cash was intolerable.
“There was that middle period where it was just so annoying that not everything could be like an Uber experience,” he said.
The same expectation shift, he argued, is about to hit brand interactions. The first hotel company to proactively get you the room and the seats before you ask earns your loyalty. And that’s all because of how it makes you feel.
“Hospitality is the business of experiences,” Valtr says.
