On Wednesday, Choice Hotels International kicked off its 10th annual tech summit, MasteryX, bringing together more than 650 associates to learn about the latest technologies impacting the hospitality industry.
The summit aims to produce tech solutions that will drive more revenue, reduce costs and find efficiencies for franchisees. This year, topics of focus include artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
MasteryX is “more than just a conference — it’s a launchpad for the future of hospitality technology,” according to Brian Kirkland, Choice Hotels’ chief information officer.
Each year, the summit runs hackathons in which engineers develop and present new software products designed to improve hotel operations and guest experiences. Last year’s winner helped the company automate the creation of special rates and promotions for repeat hotel guests and packages for local businesses, Choice shared in a Wednesday release. The tech has since been leveraged by 600 hotels, resulting in almost 450,000 room nights booked and more than $31 million in sales, per the company.
Ahead of this year’s summit, Hotel Dive sat down with Kirkland to learn more about what hotel technology trends are driving this year’s convention conversations as well as the next big innovations set to shape hotel operations and guest experiences.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HOTEL DIVE: What topics are being discussed at this year’s MasteryX summit?
BRIAN KIRKLAND: Everything we do is informed by the franchisees, the needs of our guests as well as our shareholders. So what we do this particular week is try to look into the future and ask: What are the technologies on the horizon? What are the opportunities that are disruptive? What are the things that are going to challenge our associates to learn and to do something different than they do in their day-to-day?
One of this year’s topics is AI. But for Choice, AI has been around for decades. Generative AI, and how it's going to be transformative or disruptive to the whole hospitality industry, that's the interesting thing that I'm really trying to push people to think big about in this conference.
How can we expect AI to shape hotel operations and systems this year?
We're already seeing quite a bit of advantage [for] the things that we do inside of Choice to run the business and to help our franchisees. For example, we’re already using productivity suite enhancements, whether it’s co-pilot tools [virtual assistants powered by AI] or just general generative AI solutions that we've built to help drive efficiency. We're seeing up to 30% improvement in developer productivity through leveraging co-pilots.
We're seeing an improved velocity to deliver [let’s say] hotel onboarding, for example. To onboard a hotel, you have to bring all the content that describes the hotel — the imagery and the information about room types and attributes of the property — and load it in all the systems. There’s a whole lot of steps involved in that process. But with the generative AI tools we're using, now that can happen much faster and on a scale that we couldn't do before.
We're investing heavily internally to drive value. For companies that are invested in tech and are getting wins, a lot of them are internally focused. Where you're not seeing a whole lot of momentum yet, externally, is on the guest experience because things [in that space] are moving so fast and changing so drastically.
Every single week, new technology and capabilities are released by the Microsofts and Googles of the world. So making sure that we’re tapped in, engaged with them and putting our franchisee data and our hotel data in the right place for guests to find it is important to us.
But, it’s really easy to get distracted by shiny objects, and so we’re trying to not do that. We’re trying to focus on things where we know there’s real return on investment, real value and real measurable outcomes that we can deliver right now.
What are some challenges hotels are facing that Choice seeks to address with technology enhancements?
The way the world is evolving, tech is part of a solution for almost every part of the business — in almost every business out there. One of the most disruptive and potentially massive impacts to business as a whole is generative AI. Our job is to make sure that we’re enabling our franchisees to benefit the most from it. That is going to be a huge area of focus and importance for our franchisees. And there’s multiple ways we’re looking at that.
How do we drive down their cost of running the business? How do we make it more efficient for them to run the business? How do they automate away the mundane so they can focus more on the hospitality side of the business and be personable and direct with the guests? We’re really trying to make it more profitable for our owners to run their businesses and maximize ROI and profitability of the rooms that they’re selling.
The guests are critical to our franchisees. So we’re [focused on details like] where guests are shopping for hotels; what they expect when they get on property; and what they expect before, during and after their stays. All of those things are drastically evolving, and technology is right at the root of all of that.
We’re very focused on making sure that we’re staying plugged in, watching the industry, watching other verticals that are also dealing with a retail experience — because they experience similar types of customer behavior changes — and just making sure that we're all ready for the pivots that are happening in the world around us.
It is a massive change that the world’s going through right now. Companies that have not invested in things like the cloud and aren't ready to pivot quickly and evolve quickly are going to suffer.
