Use AI to remove friction and surface information, and keep a human being as the person the guest actually talks to. The properties doing this well put technology behind the encounter, as with a text channel staffed by a real concierge, and refuse any tool that speaks to the guest in a human's name without the human involved.
The operators I interviewed have settled on a working rule, even if few of them state it this plainly. The technology handles the information and the friction. A person handles the encounter. Every successful deployment I have seen since the interviews follows that division, and every failure has blurred it.
The clearest example is the model most upper end properties have adopted for the concierge. Marc C. Brugger, then general manager of Rosewood Hong Kong and Rosewood Beijing, described a service that lets guests reach the concierge team by text wherever they are in the city. The guest gets immediacy and convenience. What they do not get is a chatbot, because the person answering is a concierge with real knowledge and real contacts.
“It’s like carrying a concierge with all of his or her knowledge, resources and connections in your pocket.” Marc C. Brugger, then general manager of Rosewood Hong Kong and Rosewood Beijing
Notice what that costs the property. A small team has to be staffed to answer. That is the point. The technology removed the friction of walking to the desk, and the human remained the interlocutor. The return, in Brugger’s experience, is a guest who feels accompanied through the whole stay rather than served at a counter.
The same logic applies to the data layer. A hospitality CRM will now surface a guest’s anniversary, allergy, prior order and last complaint in seconds, before the manager has reached the floor. In my conversations, the operators were consistent that the platform is only as useful as the team’s discipline in acting on it. A CRM that flags an anniversary has done nothing if nobody at the front desk mentions it in person at arrival. The tool is an input. The acknowledgment is the service.
Digital channels test the same principle in public. Mariano Silvestri, then general manager of Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa, runs a property whose isolation makes its online presence central to how guests first meet it. His view was that responsiveness matters, and that what guests respond to is the property’s own character coming through.
“If your guests can feel your spirit and personality through what you share, they will be more engaged.” Mariano Silvestri, then general manager of Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa
The warning inside that sentence is worth taking seriously. A feed that reads as templated or machine generated registers with a prospective guest the same way a scripted front desk registers with an arriving one. Guests have become fluent at spotting the difference. The welcome note signed in the general manager’s name and sent to ten thousand people in their preferred languages passes for thirty seconds and then fails for the next thirty. Properties that have substituted generated communication for a human voice are, in the experience of the operators I have continued to listen to, paying for it in trust over months and years.
So the practical guidance comes down to a few decisions. Adopt what amplifies a present human being: text channels staffed by people, translation at the touchpoints, allergen and dietary tracking, predictive maintenance that fixes a room before the guest finds the fault. Refuse what substitutes for the human: a generative concierge that replaces rather than supports the team, autonomous check in at the entry of an upper end property, any message sent in a person’s name without that person’s involvement. And treat guest data as the guest’s property, held in stewardship. Recognition is welcome. Surveillance is not, and the line between them is moving, in a direction that gives the operator less room every year.
Chapter 12, The Digital Discipline, works through these examples in detail, the ethical floor on guest data, and the three questions to ask any vendor before a pilot.