What are the 2025 must-have uses of AI in hotel marketing? | By Max Starkov

Recently Revfine asked its Panel of Digital Marketing Experts the question What are your top suggestions and best practices for using AI in hotel marketing activities (e.g., communication, data analysis, etc.)?

Here is my take:

When discussing AI, we need to specify which sub-categories of AI are we talking about: generative AI, predictive AI, general AI, machine learning, etc.

In hotel marketing, I see the following uses of generative AI like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude by Anthropic AI, Sesame Voice AI, etc.:

• Hotel AI Agent to interact with travelers’ personal AI agents. The Hotel AI Agent will know everything about the property's product, services and amenities, about the destination, local area attractions and activities, festivals, performances and sports events. Naturally, the Hotel AI Agent will be fully interfaced with the AI Search platforms and the property's PMS, RMS, CRS and CRM in order to know everything that is to know about past guests and be able to provide personalized one-to-one pricing, accommodations and services to "known guests," and negotiate the best deal with "new unknown guests."
• 24/7 sales and customer service voice channel powered by voice AI tech like Sesame AI
• AI-powered chatbots for the hotel website to handle trip planning and sill customer service
• One-to-One Marketing, powered by AI and supported by CRM will allow hoteliers to automatically personalize pricing and product offering to the individual customer level and take into consideration dynamic factors such as customer's preferences, browsing behavior, influencer status, “intent to purchase” intensity, and of course the more mundane factors like RFM value, loyalty member status, past booking history and demographics
• Content translations of website and marketing content in foreign languages
• Marketing and website copywriting
• SEO and AIO (AI Optimization)
• Online reputation management – review analysis, summations and responses.

All of the industry implementations over the past 18 months are from some of the above categories. The others like Hotel AI Agents will be implemented within the next 1-2 years.

As a matter of priority, I would recommend independent hotels to contract, train and install a) AI-powered chatbots on their websites to handle 24/7 hour online reservations, customer service and guest communications, and b) Voice AI Agent like Sesame AI to handle 24/7 phone reservations, customer service and guest communications.