How to Actually Use AI in Your Hotel: Insights from the Independent Hotel Show 2025

AI is one of the biggest topics in hospitality right now, but it feels like there are more people trying to sell you tools or talking about how humans are a thing of the past, and very few people giving practical ways to use it to improve your hotel.

Earlier this month, I attended the Independent Hotel Show 2025, where Alice Ashe (Marketing Director at Scrumptious) hosted a talk called “How to ACTUALLY Use AI in Your Hotel.”

The talk had some real examples of how hotels can start using AI to save time, as well as enhance guest experience, boost efficiency, and stay competitive with larger brands.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

AI: It’s Here to Help, Not Replace

The headline message was clear: AI will not replace your team - but it will save them time.

In hospitality, where most people wear ten different hats, this couldn’t be more relevant. AI can take on those repetitive admin tasks, giving your team more bandwidth to focus on higher priorities, like delivering an exceptional guest experience.

Alice shared that AI is especially powerful for small hotels with small teams, helping them compete with hotels that have bigger marketing and revenue management teams.

AI can be used to:

• Optimise pricing and upselling opportunities in real time
• Personalise offers and communications to guest preferences
• Handle 24/7 messaging through chatbots and automated guest comms
• Analyse reviews and trends to spot issues early
• Streamline HR and operations, from job ads to onboarding materials

And, importantly, AI won’t:

• Replace human judgment or customer service
• Run your marketing strategy for you
• Get everything perfect on the first go (it’s great for first drafts, not final outputs)

The Big Wins: Where Hotels Can See Immediate Impact

Alice broke AI down into three key categories where hotels can start making a difference straight away.

1. Guest Experience

AI can elevate guest interactions before, during and after their stay:

• Chatbots can act as 24/7 digital concierges, answering FAQs or helping guests find key info.
• Sentiment analysis tools can identify recurring themes in reviews to track guest satisfaction.
• AI can learn guest preferences — like room types or add-ons — to tailor future offers.
• Contactless journeys, from check-in to feedback collection, improve convenience and reduce admin.
• Automate or support creation of guest email replies or social media replies

2. Operations & Efficiency

Behind the scenes, AI can help teams work smarter:

• Automated scheduling for housekeeping and rotas saves hours of manual coordination.
• Onboarding docs and HR materials as well as job descriptions can be instantly generated or translated for multilingual teams.
• Weekly reports can be automated and summarised — ready for a quick human review.
• CRM and system integrations can be automated to eliminate repetitive data entry.
• Draft staff communications like internal updates or policy changes

3. Revenue & Marketing

• Forecast demand to adjust staffing and inventory for quieter periods.
• Identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities from past booking data.
• Repurpose existing content for different languages or markets, and even generate ad copy or emails that fit your tone of voice.
• Create draft social media posts

Start Small, Build Confidence

Alice’s advice for any hotel team was to start small. Pick one pain point — something repetitive that drains your team’s time — and test how AI can help.

That might be setting up a website chatbot to handle FAQs, automating competitor analysis, or even using AI to compile a summary of local events that might affect bookings.

Once you’ve automated one smaller thing to save a bit of time, you can tick off more tasks as you get more familiar with how it works.

It is possible that hotels who start automating these smaller tasks today (with human oversight), will have an advantage in the months and years ahead.

The Role of SEO in the AI Era

One of the most interesting audience questions came from a hotelier in the audience who asked: “How do we measure performance in AI platforms, and make sure we’re appearing in AI search?”

Alice’s answer was simple: talk to an SEO agency.

We are helping our clients navigate AI search and AI platforms right now, understanding how AI search such as Google AI Mode and LLMs are changing the travel research journey, and ensuring that your brand still appears when guests are planning their trip.

AI is changing organic search visibility, and hotels that are adjusting their digital marketing, content and AI strategies today will continue to be found as more and more guests use AI to plan their travels.

If you’d like to discuss how Click2Convert can help with your digital marketing activity, discover our services and get in touch today!