The Return of the Great Hotelier

Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to interview you today because you bring 20 years of experience in the commercial side, and we are going through probably the most exciting time of our travel careers right now. Terrifying. Terrifying is also very exciting with with AI changing everything, right? Right. From operations to discovery to I don't know how many things it's going to touch, but for today's podcast, I'd like to focus more on the commercial side of things,

because I feel people could learn a lot from you. So I'm excited to jump right in. And where I'd like to start is to understand your thoughts on what trustworthy AI discovery looks like, and how would you define it, and what do you think we're going to be seeing there in terms of discovery? Well, I think I think I've seen different people quoting different numbers, but I've seen all the way from travelers. Travelers already using AI to plan their trips is somewhere between 40% to like, 80%, right?

I mean, depending on who you're reading it from and when these numbers are being quoted. But that's a lot. A lot of people are already quote unquote, trusting their AI tools to recommend what their how their next trip or travel, should be planned. And so I think the, the, the trust element I think is almost already there with the consumers and I'm sure travel amongst other things, is probably not that sensitive thing for people to be asking about in AI today. I mean, I, you know, like I ask, I use all the, all the various different models.

I don't just use one, but but I can honestly tell you, you know, the AI agents know more about my daughter, my three year old daughter than any of the GP's and the doctors in this country, because that is my first port of call it any questions I have, whatever. She has a blister on our head or, you know, she's sneezing five times in a row back. That's the first place I go. And so like if I'm if I'm already using AI for like my daughter's health. Yeah. Travel is like. Low trust compared to.

That 100% hundred percent that I had. I would imagine that's how most people feel about trip planning. And, so I think people will have this much higher degree of trust with their AI assistants. And so then it just becomes all about, wow. What is that AI agent going to be recommending to the travelers about where to go and which hotels to stay, and what activities to do and where to go to eat, and how to plan their itinerary. Right. And so that's the that's the discovery piece that we, try to focus on a lot here,

which is, you know, how do we influence the AI agents to recommend that our hotels and restaurants and services are the ones that it recommends to the right prompts? Amazing. And I think that the implications are obviously quite far reaching. And you've written a lot about this where you talk about the inversion of distribution, right? Yeah. So would you like to like just tell us a little bit about the set, the second order consequences of this AI discovery being so trustworthy. Yeah.

And how that completely changes everything. And why that makes today the most exciting time ever. I guess the simplest way to think about it is today, regardless of how good or bad your hotel is, if I can get on a list where the travelers are searching the hotels on a Google search result page. Expedia page where I'm wherever. Yeah. If I can get on that list and then optimize my ranking within that list and optimize my listing on that platform, then I had a really good chance of capturing X amount of demand

to come and stay at my hotel. And, the experience that, that that guest had was summarized into a number like eight out of 10 or 9.5 out of ten, which then was was a factor into the ranking of my hotel on such listings. But it was always thought of as a sort of a downstream consequence of my distribution funnel. Right? My distribution funnel is get on a list, get high ranked, ranked high on that list, look good on that list. Guest. Come and stay. Experience the hotel that stay a review.

Yeah review factors like it summarizes into a number gets factored into one of 100 variables that decide what my ranking is on that listing. And then and then the cycle continues. That's how things work today. So, you know, I earn my living by making sure that I am on that list and get ranked high on that list. And, you know, among other things, that is like the most powerful thing, the single most influential thing that I can do as a commercial strategist of a hotel. But that distribution funnel is inverting.

So that's where this inverse distribution theory is coming from, which is that the guest experience that we talked about as being sort of the last in that funnel, essentially is being elevated to near the top of that funnel, and that the reason why it's doing that is because, the I, the thing that we all trust to ask about their kids health, when they're asking about which hotel should I stay, it's all it's gonna do. All of that kind of filtering work for you in advance, and then only recommend you like 2 or 3 hotels that you should you should consider.

And, by the time that the AI has recommended you those 2 or 3 hotels, it has already by then qualified out of the thousand hotels that are in London, how many of these meet the specific criteria that this traveler is asking for by location, pricing bucket, traveling with two kids, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then once it's narrowed it all down to say, I don't know, say 50 hotels. Again, behind the scenes, it is then looking at, okay, well then what are the key differentiators among these 50 hotels that I need to carefully select?

Because I can't give 50 hotels to this, recommend 50 hotels to the traveler. I should only really recommend like three, and so that it then goes through iterations of what what it thinks the different key differentiators are to ultimately produce the three hotel recommendation output. And in that moment, I believe that the, the experience that the guest has at the hotel will play a crucial role. And so, basically, by the time that the traveler is given that recommendation, that is the moment that the guest becomes aware of the hotels that he or she needs to to consider,

whereas that awareness today is the thing that has to happen at the beginning with AI, that is the last thing that that happens and all that qualification, the consideration is the thing that happens before that and behind the scenes and the guests doesn't even know about it or is even aware of it. But the main key driver of determining whether you're a hotel guest recommended or not, a big part of that is going to be whether your hotel is actually able to provide a good, good enough

experience to a point that it differentiates you from the other hotels that also qualify to meet that customers need. I feel like I've rambled on quite a bit. No, I get you, I get you, and I feel like what you're saying is that we are moving from human qualification to AI qualification. Yeah. And so the human would look at the list and say, oh, the color of this looks very nice. The listing picture's really great. I'm going to pick that. I'm going to click that. I don't know why the price looks nice.

The listing picture looks nice and that's the qualification. But the AI doesn't care about the listing picture colors. And it's not going to get fooled so easily because it can churn a lot more variables impartially than a human who might just be fatigued and just be like, I'm just going to pick the first one, or I'm just going to pick the third one because I can't review all of these. Yeah. So we can no longer play the listing game and try and get yourself to the top by gaming the algorithm. Correct.

But now you gonna have to game the AI. And that's a little harder than gaming the algorithm, because you're going to have to give it some substance. Yeah. You can you can't fool your way into being on the top of that list. No. And I think that is what, kind of keeps all of us as hoteliers honest about what makes our hotels good hotels and if you just travel back in time, maybe 30 years ago, pre-Internet and all of these things, you know, a role like what was the role of a hotel marketer or e-commerce or digital marketing or like,

none of these things existed for like, like you got good people wanted to stay at your hotel because you built up a reputation over time of offering amazing service. The type of quality of the product that the guests expected and the good location. If you are a good hotelier offering good services, people care because. Because the only way to distribute your hotel back in those days was through word of mouth, and that generally is what drove, you know, travel agents recommendations,

friends and family recommendations. I mean, apart from a big yellow page. I'll get listed on the Lonely Planet. That's what worked for me. And we just wait for the day, you know, like, just sit around like, oh, the Lonely Planet reviews here. Yeah, because I read properties in Asia and and that one day could make or break your business. Yeah. Because you get lost in the Lonely Planet and then would last you three years, right? Yeah. Yeah. And now it's. You're being evaluated continuously.

Yeah. But with the OTAs, it became a little more continuous. And now it I feel like it's being about it can reevaluate every second. Right. So to speak. Yeah. Yeah. And and so I think, I think now as long as, as long as we're good hoteliers providing good service and good. Various people will come. Yeah, because now I will essentially recommend your hotel by observing all the signals that tell it. This is a great hotel. You will get a differentiated experience. Everybody is saying so.

All the high authoritative press and other outlets are saying so that means I have a high degree of certainty that that is correct information, and therefore I will recommend Joe's Hotel over adjacent hotel. Amazing. And Jos hotels also have the added advantage of being owner operator, kind of a model. Can you tell us a little bit about how that changes things versus some other soft brands or all kind of other models in terms of franchises and stuff like that? What would how would you work on your business differently in this?

I discovery era, because you actually control the asset on the ground. I suppose this is this may or may not be specific to I specifically, but, just being an owner, operator and a brand all wrapped into one just gives you a lot more advantage than the, if you are just one of those three things. So, today, the biggest bottleneck in our industry, if you just go all if you strip everything back down to first principles, really just stems from one fact. And that is one hotel has three major stakeholders the owner, the brand and the management companies.

And they all have competing interest from one another. And therefore it's very hard to align what is the right thing that you need to get done that satisfies all three stakeholders at the same time. And so that slows things down. It creates a lot of debates. And it often leads to probably suboptimal decisions just across the board, generally not just tech, but your, org chart, at the way that you're selling the hotel, just how you're structured, all sorts. So I or. No, I being the only stakeholder in the game where you are the owner operator

and the brand just gives you a level of advantage that, to out compete, you know, your competitors just, just simply by removing, you know, those, those different competing interests, but specific to I, I think the, the biggest advantage you would have is that I again, I think that that with I discovery equals elevated importance of guest experience, or at least experience is at the same level of importance as what we would traditionally call the hotel commercial teams in driving the performance of the hotel.

And that means you are now designing this experience with a blank piece of paper. If you are the owner, operator, and brand. I am not encumbered by some brand standard. I'm not encumbered by having a different interest, i.e. if I'm a pure management company, you know, I may be making the most, most portion of my fees from revenue. Not on the, not not from the profit. And if I'm a brand, then, you know, I'm just trying to protect what makes my brand replicable and recognizable across multiple geographies, across thousands of hotels.

And therefore, you know, like my brand standard is very, very sacred. But if I'm the owner, operator and the brand, I don't have any of this stuff. So I can I can look at my, guest experience, the product quality, the service design, all of that with a blank sheet of paper and just execute on what is best for my hotel. And in that location with the bones that I have. And what kind of level of services do I need to deploy and the crew that I have, and the kind of customer and clientele that I have.

So it gives you all that flexibility that that would be harder to navigate if I was only, a manager who also needs to satisfy the owner's goals as well as the brand's goals. Yeah. That makes sense. I'd like to, like, go a little deeper there, because I think what you're essentially saying is I is also touching multiple facets of the business, and I'd like to understand who would be the owner of any kind of AI initiative within your structure. So let's say you're owner operator, you can do anything.

You kind of take this and say, oh, marketing's going to own the AI business because it's discoverability, or is it actually the IT team because it's like quite technical. You need to look at the schemas that you're putting out in your website to like refresh your FAQ, you and you give it to it. Or then do you say, actually this is the commercial team because the commercial team has good oversight or is it ops because it's like the experience depends on the ops team. How or do you think you need a separate to create a separate team?

Where is this the new AI discoverability function setting? Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a good question. I don't know, I'd be interested to find out how other people are doing it, but at least here it's become, somewhat of a very collaborative effort. And so, we, I definitely view AI and the impact of AI and the discoverability of AI is a function of performance maximization, i.e. that is a commercial function. Right? I need my hotel. So in my head it's just replacing, yesterday I was optimizing

for on, Google and OTAs and tomorrow I don't I'm only going to be focused on optimizing on AI. And in order to do that, I know it's or it appears to me that operations will have to have a very to play a significant role in that and therefore operations need to be involved. But their involvement isn't so much that you need to know how to, you need to understand AI. It's more that what you do and what you provide is going to be so much more important than it has ever been. And so double down and focus on delivering amazing experience and there will be some things that they could do

that would be enhanced by AI, coming on board, such as, you know, AI answering the calls or AI, you know, automatically capturing the guests requests and then funneling through to the right kind of systems for enhanced workflows and things like that. But by and large, it's about just, elevating what did we do today to increase our guests repeat rate by 5%? And I think just that, that that is sort of the the role of our operations. But other than that, I think it's but, but, but the people that need to care deeply about this and drive

it are the people that are focused on improving the NOI of, of the assets. And that starts, at least on the PNL structure traditionally starts with the revenue up at the top. And so those people need to have a full understanding of what is ultimately going to drive my revenue. And, and, and then bring on the right stakeholders in your business to, to to bring along I think it is interesting because I feel like this is probably the first time where you can have the most technical conversations

with the least technical knowledge dependance. So, you know, if, what were at least what I've learned throughout this whole process of, interacting with AI and trying to build processes using AI models is, everything is semantic, like literally like I don't need to write a single line of code. I don't need to know any, complex systems and integration and all of it. I am literally asking the AI model to integrate with something, and then if it can't or if it needs something, it will ask me what what it needs,

and I just need to tell it back. All the instructions and the rules, which may have been typed into some very like structured coded code looking way in the past. It's just literally blocks of text right in like cloud MD you wrote a cloud that MD that is just literally box of blocks of text skills that MD, a bunch of text. Absolutely. You want to deploy an agent? It's not some secret code that go behind it. You're right. If you create a file called agents that MD write or something, and then you just

write a bunch of stuff into it. And so very non-technical. So I think this is the first time where, you know, you need a bit of, you need a lot of sort of governance and control that it folks bring in, to the table. But, but you can have so much, you can drive a lot of this conversations without knowing or having zero technical knowledge. Absolutely. Because anyone can start today. You know your hotel so well. So you can just go into ChatGPT and say, find me a hotel with parking and with breakfast and blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. And you would expect yourself to show up as the top three in that list. And if you're not showing up, then you need to kind of work backwards and say, why am I not showing up? What are the sources here? Because it will also show you the sources that kind of gives you. And then you can kind of start auditing yourself without a programmer and without hiring an agency. You can just do it in five minutes. Yeah. And I think that's that's a good way to start.

Having said that, I want to kind of go back to what you said a little while ago in terms of the metrics that you're measuring. So what you said earlier was that the ops team would try to increase repeat guests by 5%, which is kind of straightforward. That's very experience dependent and kind of touches on loyalty. Maybe not so much I involve them, but I do like the fact that you said that, everything would start at the top with the revenue team looking at NOI. Well, eventually looking at the NOI, but first looking at revenue, obviously.

So in terms of any AI initiatives that you might launch or start, where do you think you begin to see value first? So let's say you do some big AI project. What metric would you first be tracking? So would you be looking at occupancy? Would you be looking at channel mix? Would you be looking at, I don't know, a share of direct bookings. Where do you think the value is going to show up? First, if you have a successful AI discovery project running. It's a good question. I actually think it's going to show up in,

our operating efficiency first. And by that what I mean is so I again, I kind of go back to the inverse distribution theory. I do think operational excellence now moves up to the top of the funnel. And. And so what that means is now, in order for you to be recommended more, you need to drive operational excellence like that is almost a prerequisite for you to be performing at a high level in the future. Yes, you still need to make sure you have the right ingestible data. There's some technical stuff that you've got to do, but that's that's more downstream here.

And that is a that is but but the but the excellent operational excellence is a prerequisite to this. So so that is where you would want to solve or deploy your AI against first. Right. And that means there are stuff that you can deploy AI against to enhance your operational excellence and or enhance guest experience. And there's a lot of AI. That's where, you know, I think I can can assist with that. And so, you know, you could deploy an AI to orchestrate all of the guest requests no matter what

the channels that they are, you know, making those requests from, and then orchestrate that information with the relevant tasks and workflow with, from the hotel teams. And what that means is I view this as a guest experience enhancement, because now the guest no longer has to wait around for the front desk to pick up the phone for that late night burger or, or, guest who doesn't speak a language, you know, the at the hotel that they're staying in, like all of this, these things just get fixed immediately

with that AI deployment. And that is a good experience enhancer. But the reason why I say, I think where the the metric that will show up first is, is going to be in the on the expense side because you will naturally see, hotels getting more efficient about where and how to deploy, either labor or expenses in order to satisfy those requests, with the AI kind of being the main orchestrator, because then it will know. So today we operate with a lot of blind spots like what is the distribution of our phone calls

throughout 24 hour period? You know, and by, you know, day of week, like, what are those calls about? And when they do call, how long do they last? I mean, we get stats, but none of us really, like, really show to those, not to those. And look at exactly what kind of conversations we're having. Look, you know, the nature of these requests and all of that stuff. Well, I should be able to handle all of that for us to, you know, make us more efficient so that I'm almost staffing up for a, an overnight reservations department.

We would know exactly how to staff it because we would know some of these overflow cases. I can handle them or, you know, whatever. And that's just one example. Or do we need to have, a runner to deliver room service in the middle of the night? Or not? Today we do, but tomorrow. Exactly how many are we talking about, you know, and at what time? And again, we can kind of see the high level numbers because we can see X number of room service orders are, you know, ordered and, you know, roughly at these timeframes.

But, and we can kind of deep dive into that. But then there could be, you know, if there is a big event happening, there was a concern, you know, that happened the middle of the night. And so the, the very nature of the guest mix at the hotel is different that night, which means that we will get a spike in, you know, room service orders in the middle of the night, more than usual, like these types of things that I could help us with, that we don't currently have a foresight on, that we would be able to then,

you know, use to, to to staff up accordingly or the kinds of, stuff that we order and stock up thinking we might need these, but actually we probably don't. And so in thinking about in thinking about enhancing the guest experience, I think the side effect of that is, it reduced expenses, and that will show up in the first. But then the ultimate aim would be, or the longer kind of a more sustaining metric that's more important than the expense saving will be. higher recommendation for new guests to come and stay with you,

the same guests that stayed with you, to repeat with you, the same guests that have now are now advocating on your behalf to spread that digital word of mouth, to get their close friends and family and their inner circle to come and stay with you. Those metrics will be harder to measure. But yeah, but that will be kind of the longer term sustainable. Fascinating. So essentially what you're saying is that you have to focus on getting a product better. Yeah. Because I makes, matching more transparent.

It's kind of absolute value. You're trying to connect the guests to your product and it's going to surface any lack of, experience that you have in the property. It's going to like surface that pretty easily. And you can't kind of fool the guest anymore because the eye is going to be much more diligent. Yes. I wanted to kind of take that back to discoverability again, to say, okay, let's say you work on your product. Everyone's very passionate about their product. Everyone wants that to get better.

And let's say you utilize AI to bring in that efficiency. You're going to see the side effect of balance sheet. Sorry the BNL kind of cost dropping because you're getting more efficient. However, where does that feedback loop go back into the AI? So how does I figured out figure out that you've improved your product? Is this back via auto reviews? So in other words, are we still stuck with the OTAs to be that link of trustworthy, feedback of real time stuff happening on the property and an intermediary kind of vouching for that information

versus the hotel telling the AI, yes, it's amazing. Yeah. 100%. Yeah, I think so. I think I think, that feedback loop, I think, basically is captured in probably three areas, right. So one is, is the the guests themselves writing reviews after the great experience that they had. They are writing about their own experience on. Yeah. On the OTAs. They're also then, writing about their experience on review sites or, you know, like TripAdvisor or Google or something like that. And then I think there will also be the stuff that we will, try to amplify the same kind of experience, but,

but deliver through, like media and, you know, travel magazines and things like that. So that's kind of the PR play, which I think will have a huge impact, in how, the I will wait the opinion of, Condé Nast, absolutely. Travel advisor or reviewer's opinion versus, you know, Joe Schmo on Booking.com writing a five star review. And, and so, so, so then it becomes somebody in the commercial team's job to make sure that a, that you are, you are amplifying your own guests to write reviews for you.

And it doesn't matter where it is OTA or somewhere else. I think the worst thing you can do is to try and get, you know, funnel and people to just answer some of these feedback in your own internal review sites. I think those are the value of that, I think, is going to diminish pretty quickly because I will I think, again, I'm no expert in this. So this is just me thinking. And I could be totally wrong here, but I don't I from from what I understand, I will essentially under index what you

the hotel has to say about yourself. Then what other people have to say about your your hotel and just the, just the testimonials or whatever that you put onto your own website through your own internal survey, just views like it's you talking good about your own hotel. And so I think that I think the importance of those things will start to diminish. And the just the visible, publishable online reviews just become so much more important. But the more important than that are going to be your, you know, the kind of the, the,

the media outlets talking about you. And and. Yeah. And then so then as a hotel commercial team, your job is to make sure that all of these right people talk about your, your hotel in the right way onto these right channels all the time. It'll be about us nudging and trying to get them to, to amplify, those messages, to create that feedback loop back into the I so it reinforces that continuous. We are missing this social media feed, right? For the AI because as hoteliers like you just be consumer focused and you've got so many people

on TikTok talking about you social with such a big channel and getting word of mouth out there via social. But then that just kind of doesn't connect back to channel CPD and cloud and stuff like that. So it's kind of infuriating a little bit. Yeah. No, I wish and I don't know what the blocker is there. Do you think is that just some licensing? Yeah, it's just an API. It's just the API. I guess the social media companies know how valuable that data is. Yeah. And meta is like, why should I give that to anyone?

Yeah. And I guess this kind of, Yeah, this is a bit of an annoyance. I think it could have helped hotels a lot in terms of discovering the truth, because then you're kind of posting videos and photos. And obviously I think that, like, the capability of AI is only going to grow. Yeah, it's just going to recognize videos and media a lot better in time. Yeah. So no. So I well, but I suppose that's where meta is kind of being a bottleneck in this whole ecosystem. Right. Because because they, they don't have a great, great frontier model themselves.

And so the kind of behind a little bit, but I've long held the view that, the most important and the most underrated social media channel in our industry is YouTube. It's like people love whenever we're talking about marketing. Everyone loves to talk there. When we talk about social media, de facto we're always talking about Instagram. Yeah. And if you're talking about TikTok yeah. So if you're not talking about Insta you're talking about TikTok. But actually the the one social channel where I have always been able

to see visible, verifiable impact has always been YouTube. And, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, is, totally indexable, digestible and is incorporated, at least with in all models, as far as I understood. But Gemini obviously has a has a much what's great advantage on that. Right. And, so I think that YouTube again, very underutilized by the hotels today. But seriously, it needs to be something that everyone needs to be looking at. I've been but it's it's also I recognize the very

difficult one for hoteliers to get their head around. And I don't know why. It's like when you're thinking about social media, your head goes to Instagram and all I'm asking is if you're going to get an influencer, an Instagram influencer, to come in and say, just reach out to a YouTube, a YouTuber to come in and do the A. Review right. Here. Yeah, but but that, that that's, that's actually really hard. It's a lot harder than than than I thought. I think it's the way the marketing agencies are set up and they have been created out of

there's a strong bias to. Instagram. Yeah. And almost none on YouTube. This is some serious alpha here. But it's true. Yeah. It's that's true. Yeah that's true I never thought about it myself. And the impact YouTube videos have on I, you know is is. So everyone's got to go do their YouTube review right now. They're gonna put keywords in your email to search for YouTube influencers. And I don't think YouTube influencers reach out as well. I don't know, just everyone's got this in their mind that YouTube guys are just like reviewing products

and doing something like that. But hotels? Why not? Yeah, long form or even. Yeah, it doesn't have to be influencer. It could be YouTube shorts as well. Yeah, we could be creating content. Oh yeah. For YouTube. Yeah. But we don't do that. Any hotel create a content for our own social media channels should be all for Insta. And it should go on YouTube, right? Again, if I had, I know. So marketing is part of my responsibility here and even I can't really change that. Yeah, this is a big this is a hard change to make because it actually it's not just the people

that are executing in marketing, but it goes all the way up to, you know, the, the all the stakeholders and ownership and everyone and no one thinks YouTube, everyone thinks this stuff because. You need to change your metrics. You also got to invest in the channel and invest in your presence and stuff like that. Yeah. That's amazing. So let's say that I want to make it a little more real at this stage. So let's say we give you a hotel today. What would be the things that we would be looking at in terms of getting that hotel I ready.

And if you have some kind of a checklist for someone listening right now, how do we make it actionable? Hey, ready? Well, I guess the first thing to do is, gotta sign up to, some type of business account of a genetic AI solution. So, like, not your. So I think most people still think when they think I, they still think the the chat window of a ChatGPT. I ask you the question, I get an answer back. That's about as far as people, still think what the you know, how they think of AI.

But but if they actually signed up to cloud, for example, and download a cloud as an app on their desktop, yep, it will blow their socks off on what it can do. ChatGPT just, Codex they just updated their. It just came out yesterday. I think unfortunately, it's only available on a mac. Right. But, but Codex now has takes full control over your computer. It can do things that you didn't think possible. It'll blow your socks off. Chrome or Gemini just became a mac app as well. Or is coming out very soon.

That also will do the, something similar. These things now are just giving you answers. It actually does stuff. And I have seen, for example, just with amongst our team experimenting with, you know, these different tech. I, apps, installed on their computers is that they're, they're building automated tasks within their remit of their job scope, and they're just. And some of these guys are going wild, right? They they understand what, tasks that they do that are more mundane and can be automated.

And, and they're using, something like claw to start automating a lot of these tasks, stuff that they didn't think was possible because of some stories that they've been told or heard by vendors about what level of integrations exists or don't exist. And so whatever they thought was impossible before, they just threw a question at, at AI and suddenly realizing it is possible. And it's actually if it if it if it can't find the API integration document already, then it will literally fire up a browser and start like logging into these websites

to actually make stuff happen. Utilizing these systems. And the reason why I bring this up is I think if you watch. If you want to be I ready. I think the first step to do is for you to get comfortable and really understand what is possible with AI today, and I think most people only use it as some chat bot. But they just need to download the app and and and create tasks with AI for them to understand what is possible. And then once you understand what could be possible, then,

you know, you start reaching out to specialists and vendors and other people that really focus on specialized in this area to really solve for a very specific need that you have at your hotel, with AI, but that that conversation is much more, it's a it's a lot more educated conversation and informal conversation than, you know, calling somebody up and go, hey, can your I read my emails, you know, like that's a different level of conversation. Yeah. And I think we also are getting to a stage where you can kind of, as you said earlier in the conversation,

build a lot of the tools yourself. Yeah. And for example, I was at a client site last week and we were discussing their listing on an obscure order and there were no APIs. I don't think that's on. And I just opened up my cloud desktop. I created a task. I scheduled a task to say every morning at 9 a.m., go to the order, check my ranking, tell me where I'm showing up on that list so that in case it drops, I've already got a notification and I can kind of manage my listing on the LTE

because even though it's like smaller, it's still important to my mix. Yeah, yeah. And that's just a good example of a task that I never have to do ever again. Yeah, because I don't need to like, say, let's nine in the morning, I get like, coffee. Check the listing. Am I there? I might not there. Yeah. And, it's not fulfilling or satisfying. But now that I just automates that and takes it away from you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. And there is an infinite number of those types of things. Yeah.

So we've, you know, I mean, everybody has these challenges and, you know, for example, we, you know, simple things like, when you receive a reservation from an OTA and it comes with the virtual credit card, what do we need to do? Like we need to actually move that virtual credit card from window one to window to, people watching or listening to this. We'll know what that means. Unfortunately, everyone unfortunately knows that. And then unfortunately, we'll know how big of a pain in the butt of of that

that job is for whatever unfortunate soul that needs to do it. I can handle that already. Yeah, you can create a task, an automated task that can actually go in and then move the credit card from one window to another. Right. A nice note that I've done it. And, you know, and then and then you multiply these types of examples of tasks by, I don't know, a thousand. And again, I think that and so then that's where that's why I say I think the efficiency will show up next in the NOI. Yeah.

On on that PNL first. Yeah. And now we've spoken about one hotel, but you've obviously got a very different channel. You've got like 120 hotels. So is there or how are you thinking about the risk or standardization? Because that's how you're sitting in your office and you're like, I want this for all properties. And then obviously as you standardize, you're kind of smoothening out all the profiles of your properties, and it might eliminate some of the quirkiness that could potentially surface those hotels

higher in the AI discoverability kind of pattern. So do you worry about that? Like any standardization project could be slightly counterproductive as well. And we talking about like standardizing the processes here. The data, standardizing the data and standardizing like the profiles and like from a brand point of view just sandpaper the edges. Well actually I think a standardization is almost required if you want to do any meaningful I work on top right because it actually, if you're going to be building out a lot of these sort of automated, tasks and create some kind of structure

in how you need to, you know, in form that I or have I leverage your data in some way. By almost by definition, you need to structure that data in somewhat of a standardized format for for that work to take place. And so I think you, you almost have to because that's actually the work that we did. One of the first work that we did was we standardize that data structure so that everybody calls all these different parts of our business the same thing, at least in a standardized way,

sitting on a unified tech stack so that we're all using the same system so that when we're when we're doing anything with AI, it it knows what system to go and what to call things. And that that sounds very simple, but you actually need that in order to reduce any kind of risk of, you know, hallucinations or anything going wrong. Yeah. But but our standardization doesn't, it leaves a ton of room for, where it leaves room for flexibility is the way that you deliver that experience to to to the guest.

So the as long as the standardization doesn't impose, you got to have five towels in your room, right? The standardization doesn't say anything about that, about the towels. But but it's just the underlying process of. You got it all. Are there towels in the room. Yep yep yep. And when the guest is talking about towels, what do we do about that. Yeah. And how long. And you know, like that's what we have to have. And that's what we're kind of working on. But, because yes, the, the stuff that makes each property unique and that experience differentiated

are the things that are going to make them more recommendable by AI. So we want to create, maintain the maximum flexibility. So there's breathing room for guest experience. But from a data and process and technology point of view you want that kind of locked down and standardized. So that. Yes. You have the business in a place where you can manage. It. Yes, yes. And I know we're running out of running out of time here. I just want to like, kind of start winding this up. And if you had to pick and I'm again, I'm looking at the downside now for one second and just say,

if you had to pick something that you might be, wary of in terms of the guardrails, which would be highest on your list if you were to pick between, let's say, privacy, security transparency, fairness. Anything else on your list? Is there something that's big on your list for caution when it comes to AI? Well, I'm actually quite libertarian when it comes to these types of matters. I'm usually the person that, other people in the company have to like, kind of hold me back so that I don't go too crazy.

So I don't know if I'm the right human oversight. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not the right person for this. For this. Okay. I'd like to go full on and then. And then if the issue comes up, then we'll deal with them at the time. But. And maybe that's where the IT department kind of comes in also to kind of bring that disciplinary structure. Yes. But yeah I mean I IT director hold me accountable and yeah. Holds me in my place. Very nice. And let's say we're three years from now like we've kind of seen a little more of this AI wave.

Is this some number or metric you would look at to say, oh yeah, we've ridden this wave successfully and you're happy with your efforts? I feel like right. speed at which this, I think is evolving is so fast, by the time you feel like you're caught up to anything, like something else had just happened. So to, to give you an example, I feel and, you know, because change is hard, right? And change at scale is even harder. The biggest change that I feel like we had to fight so hard to overcome already in the last year and a half,

was to just get people to even use AI. Like before you write that email, just run it through. ChatGPT. Just, you know, just to see if, you know, if there's anything that could be improved on that. That's a simple thing. But like what we but we as an industry just spent like two years just to get there. And then just as we were just getting comfortable with people using AI for simple data retrievals and queries and sanitizing your own writing styles, core code came out. Codex came out and it it rocked our world.

And that only happened in the last, what, 2 or 3 months? Yeah, that. Was November 26th. The release. Yeah. So, yeah. and then now these things are taking full control over your computers, not just, you know, staying in their little terminal. Right. And so, things are. Yeah, things are moving and changing so much. I don't even know. It's hard for me to even answer what what metric or, like, what is this going to happen or that going to happen? I think the only thing that. So so that's why as a, as someone who is not technical,

that's why I'm viewing the impact on AI, not so much on how do I best leverage AI. I'm looking at what is the downstream consequence of AI becoming more prevalent in our lives, and what is what would that mean to. Yeah, discoverability and our the impact that our hotels demand. And how do I best prepare for that. And then the answer that I keep coming back to is we just gotta have a differentiated product and a great guest experience, and everything else is sort of we'll sort of take care of itself, right?

I don't need to be an AI genius and leading the charge in AI adoption in my company. Although I would love to, I would love for that to still happen. But I also recognize I'm always going to be behind the curve, right? Because we're hoteliers and this thing is moving so fast. But at least at least I am. At least I need to think about what I can do best in that scenario. And I keep defaulting back to great service, amazing product, differentiated experience, and the rest of it's also amazing.

And I I've spoken to a lot of people and I can definitely say you're not behind the curve. Yeah. So I've learned a lot today. Joe, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Appreciate it I know thanks for having me.