On the second day of World Travel Market, SiteMinder, Revinate and IDeaS run an Executive Breakfast Event. This year I was invited to speak and facilitate this session.  As we gathered together over breakfast our Hospitality Thought Leaders discuss The Future of Hotels and Travel.

The main question posed to the audience was ‘Who will be running our hotels of the future – Humans or Robots?’ I took our delegates down memory lane looking at some of the old ways of doing things. From this I demonstrated how rapidly technology has embedded itself into our daily lives.  Throughout the session I ran interactive polls to gauge the audiences views and understanding of the topics we were discussing.

The first question for them to consider was ‘Will human hospitality be enough to stop the robots from taking over?’. Working in groups their feedback was captured. They looked at this from three different points of view – the human hotelier, the robots and the human guest.

Having the discussed what Artifical Intelligence actually is and how it shows itself our thought leaders were then split in to three groups once more. This time they had to imagine it is 2042, 25 years into the future and discuss what would be happening in their hotels. The focus of this discussion was ‘How can the hotel of the future embrace technology to enhance their guest experience?’ The groups looked at the Booking and Pre Arrival process, the Arrival and Check in, and what happens during their stay.

The feedback was captured and from the ideas generated they were then asked to rank their top three.

As a thank you to all the thought leaders that participated, they were given a goodie bag to take away which also included a copy of my book ‘Star Quality Experience – The Hotlelier’s Guide to Creating Memorable Guest Journeys’

What is the future of hotels and travel?

From the polls and surveys carried out, the results will be revealed in a webinar on the 5th December 2017 entitled A.I. meets Human Hospitality. which you can register for on the highlighted link.