Enhancing efficiency and guest experience in hospitality through technology

The second day of the eighth edition of the prestigious BW Hotelier Indian Hospitality Summit & Awards (IHA 2024) hosted the BWH IT & Tech Roundtable with moderator Anthony Khoury, VP - Asia Pacific, RMS including panellists Aryavir Kumar, Managing Director, The Clarks Hotels & Resorts, Anirudh Ganesh, Co-founder & CEO, Hotelzify along with Kahraman Yigit, Co-founder & CEO, Olive by Embassy.

Akshay Thusoo, Senior Vice President - Commercial, Sarovar Hotels and Tejarshi Roy, Vice President Strategic Initiatives, Lemon Tree hotels as well as Vivek Gangishetty, Vice President - Sales & Marketing, India and SouthEast Asia, RMS offered their insights on the topic of technological advancements, enhancing efficiency and guest experience in hospitality.

Ganesh emphasised the use of AI for cutting down acquisition and improving conversion rates, he stated, “In terms of marketing AI is a big game changer, if you’re able to marry a hotel’s primary data to the USP’s that they have you can get better ROAS. AI cannot answer everything but it can answer 70-80 per cent of the questions instantly. These are massive cases for the hotels to drive down acquisition through better quality traffic and improving your conversion rates.”

Yigit added, “Hospitality is about empathy, the human connection and no matter how much we automate, we don’t wanna lose that. We’ve been able to drive down our manpower ratio to efficient levels and we’ve been able to increase the level of hospitality that we provide.”

Kumar on the topic of collaboration commented, “I believe that, if we solve distribution via collaboration, it will solve a major part of the collaboration. Being a mid-market player, another problem is the distribution of talent across segments.”

Thusoo noted the importance of adopting technology to generate income, “The world of hotels is focussed too much on adopting technology from point one to point three whereas at Sarovar, we look at point three to point one which means focus on technologies which can enhance and make customer experience better but probably is implemented in the back-end so, it also yields more income.”

Shedding light on how AI can positively impact EBITDA, stated, “It’s a sweet spot when your AI adoption intent and your depth of proprietary data converge and it can have a positive impact on your EBITDA. We are able to track whether our database received that rate at that particular time at the desired frequency.”

Gangishetty emphasised, “We want to reach about 150,000 to 200,000 keys by 2027, that is a very clear vision as far as the topline is concerned. We also want to understand how the Indian homegrown brands work.”

The two-day BW Hotelier Indian Hospitality Summit & Awards (IHA 2024) encompasses over 20 sessions where hospitality veterans and experts across the nation gather in order to provide diverse knowledge and insights. The Summit & Awards is a testament to BW Hotelier’s commitment towards revolutionising Indian hospitality by honouring the Crème de la crème of the industry.