The Hotel Industry Is Getting AI Wrong

Mews founder Richard Valtr isn’t impressed with the current AI products flooding the hotel industry.

“I’m actually very, very disappointed in the imagination of a lot of the entrepreneurs coming into this industry,” he told Skift at the International Hotel Investment Forum (IHIF) in Berlin last month.

The critique extends beyond startups. Hotel groups themselves, Valtr argued, are each making a version of the same mistake by reacting to AI rather than thinking through what it actually means.

Most hotels’ AI products ask how guests want to search. Very few are asking why a consumer would choose to engage with a hotel brand at all, or on whose terms.

Mews is a cloud-based property management system serving more than 15,000 hotels across 85 countries, and Valtr has a clear view on where the industry is going wrong.

Richard Valtr, Founder of Mews, at Mews’ Unfold event. Source: Mews.

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