AI will absorb the routine roles in a hotel, from reservations to standard correspondence, and it already has in many properties. It will not replace the people whose work defines the luxury proposition, because what they bring is judgment and accumulated relationships, and neither of those can be generated by a platform.
The honest answer has two parts, and most of the public conversation only hears the first. Yes, a large share of the work that hotels employed people to do a generation ago is being automated. Reservations have been handled by online booking, channel management and voice systems for several years at most serious properties. Revenue management runs on pricing engines that outperform the human pricing decisions of the past. The keeper of the inventory spreadsheet, the typist of standard correspondence, the agent who answered the routine booking call: those roles are narrowing, and the operators I interviewed do not pretend otherwise.
The second part is what the people running the best properties in the world actually believe about the roles that remain. Christian A. Hassing, then area vice president and general manager of Mandarin Oriental, Singapore, drew the line as clearly as anyone in my conversations.
“While automation, applications and other technologies have provided new opportunities for the luxury travel industry to boost efficiency, technology cannot replace the human touch nor the personal relationships developed between our guests and colleagues.” Christian A. Hassing, then area vice president and general manager of Mandarin Oriental, Singapore
The word doing the work in that sentence is relationships. Axel Bethke, then general manager of Qasr Al Sarab Desert Resort by Anantara in Abu Dhabi, made the same point about the concierge. A guest arriving today has more local information on their phone than any concierge could hold in their head. That changes nothing about the value of the role, because the information was never the asset.
“They have a personal network that the Internet cannot mimic.” Axel Bethke, then general manager of Qasr Al Sarab Desert Resort by Anantara, Abu Dhabi
Think about what that network consists of. The restaurant owner across town who will hold a table at midnight because this concierge is asking. The florist who will produce a specific arrangement on six hours’ notice. The driver who knows which route works at six in the evening. These relationships were built over years by one specific person, and the next generation of AI concierge can surface every fact about the city without being able to make that one phone call. The kitchen has the same asset in the chef’s producers: the fishmonger who calls when the best of the catch comes in, the small farmer who holds back the rare cultivar. A kitchen sourcing through an algorithm gets what the algorithm allocates.
There is a quieter shift underway that matters more for anyone planning a career. For most of the industry’s history, the senior person on the floor was the keeper of the property’s memory of its guests. The CRM now holds more of that than any individual can. What the senior person keeps instead is the judgment: which welcome, which calibration of warmth and restraint, will land for this guest tonight. Authority on the floor used to rest on what a person remembered. It now rests on what they decide, and that is harder to teach and far harder to automate.
The question that should worry an operator is a different one. When the routine roles are absorbed, what happens to the people and the savings? The properties handling this well have used the savings to make the remaining human roles more skilled and better paid: the front desk agent who was one of twelve becomes the relationship manager for a defined set of guests. The properties handling it badly have taken the savings as margin and left a team that feels it is operating the parts the machine cannot yet handle. Those are two different cultures, and guests can tell them apart.
Chapter 12, The Digital Discipline, sets out where the technology is already helping, where it cannot go, and the Adopt/Resist/Delay Matrix for deciding between the two.