Automating Guest Communication with a Human Touch for Global Hospitality Success

Context

Chain hotels struggled with guest messaging: they were slow to respond and inconsistent in their communication, leading to higher cancellation rates.

The OTA recognized that Machine Learning (ML) automation could increase efficiency and reduce cancellation rates, but needed to implement it in a way that would still reflect their accommodation partners' hospitality values.

They understood that hotels would resist an automation initiative unless carefully designed to enhance rather than replace their personal touch.

The Challenge

Accommodation partners expressed deep reservations, fearing that automation would erode the personalized, warm interactions central to their identity.

Likewise, guests had high expectations for responsiveness, yet any automation approach risked losing their trust if perceived as impersonal, unclear, or inaccurate.

Our Approach

We conducted comprehensive research covering the entire spectrum from operational workflows to testing real-world implementation.

We led face-to-face interviews with hospitality professionals to uncover existing communication practices. We designed and facilitated a generative exercise where staff created unified responses to varied guest inquiries, helping extract patterns for effective automated messaging.

We ran usability testing of the setup prototype to ensure hotels could customize messaging to match their brand voice. To validate our findings at scale, we designed and analyzed a 2×3 factorial survey with 12,000 OTA users, testing how message automation awareness and specificity affected traveler satisfaction and booking behavior.

Business Impact

The research laid the foundation for a structured, AI-driven messaging system that balances automation with human oversight. We helped the business develop a scalable framework for expanding automation across hotel partners, along with a deeper understanding of guest communication dynamics that continues to inform the OTA's product strategy.

By approaching automation not just as a technical solution but as a hospitality-enhancing tool, this project helped the OTA reduce partner resistance through clear evidence that automation enhances hospitality values. We guided product and ML teams in designing automation thoughtfully, aligning brand integrity, operational efficiency, and guest satisfaction.

The result was a communication model that improves partner efficiency, reduces guest frustration, and scales with business growth.