BITAC Sales & Marketing 2025 Panel: AI in Hospitality

By Jim Nelson | April 15, 2025

SAN DIEGO, CA — At the recent BITAC/Hotel Interactive Sales & Marketing event, one of the panels dove into a topic on the tip of everyone’s tongues: AI. Moderated by PM Hotel Group SVP of Commercial Strategies Lovell Casiero, the panelists were Candace Banning, who handles sales, marketing, and revenue operations at CoralTree Hospitality; Stephanie Atkisson, SVP of commercial strategies at Raines Co.; and Brenna Halliday, VP of strategic insight at Host Hotels & Resorts.

Moderator Casiero began the panel with a disclaimer: “No one knows a lot about AI yet, so this powerful panel of awesome women sitting here, we’re learning together as an industry.”

LOVELL CASIERO: I recently learned from the principal of Milestone a couple of things that made me go, “You need to learn all you can about AI”: Number one, the last time we saw this trajectory of growth at the pace that we are seeing with people using AI to look for guest rooms was when people started shopping on mobile. Number two is where the information about your hotels actually comes from; I will save that for our questions, but you’re going to be shocked.

STEPHANIE ATKISSON: For AI, the biggest opportunity, and I guess the most exciting thing, is the optimizing of resources. It’s in all departments, allowing us to be able to do what we do in hospitality on a greater scale, and optimizing that service level for our customers.

CANDICE BANNING: What excites me about AI is that we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more that we don’t know. And it excites me that there’s time saving involved. The future is bright — a little scary — and bright.

BRENNA HALLIDAY: In the near term, what I find most exciting about this generative AI piece is really the opportunity for very unique content creation, whether that be through marketing, through socials, even writing creative menus that tell the story of our properties.

LC: So how can these technologies enhance personalized services for guests?

SA: We’re going to see a lot of personalized services come from this as it learns the preferences of the guests. It’s going to be able to offer them more things, such as local restaurants and attractions; it’s going to be prompting some of those things, golf tee times, those type of amenities to add on. It’s going to go even to preventative maintenance and tell you that you have issues in this room, these need to be fixed, and create the tickets for those. In-room preferences — fitness, playlist, wine — it’s going to be able to offer you those options.

LC: One of the things that we’re very focused on this year is TRevPAR (total revenue per available room); to the extent that it can take us beyond the obvious ancillary revenue, it’s huge. AI and trip planning — this is probably my favorite question, because this is where the cliffhanger will get addressed — is evolving rapidly. How do you see AI-enabled websites shaping the future of guest research and booking experiences, Brenna?

BH: That’s going to be very, very critical over the next couple of years, to make sure that the AI can read your website — those web crawlers can get the information from your website — and get the right information. Sometimes that means having things in narrative instead of in the tables, maybe that becomes a hidden website. I think that’s going to be critical, and what’s really cool about that is that AIs are going to increasingly know more and more about the customer and what they want. You mentioned TRevPAR and experiences, and selling more and more; that creates an upsell opportunity.

LC: Who in the room knows what Foursquare is? Another thing that I learned at the Tech Day that we hosted with Milestone: I walked in late, and they kept talking about Foursquare, and I finally said, “What is Foursquare?” And they said, “Remember that app that you used to use to check in when you went to a restaurant? That is where some of your hotel information is coming from.” And someone also mentioned another site, Reddit, that AI is also — because, again, it’s written in narrative, so it’s easy for [web crawlers] to consume. And there’s also that upvoting and downvoting feature, which helps them to decide which content to pull. So, it’s a lot for us to think about, a lot for us to be concerned about.

CB: One of the most important things to think about is what information you want to share. For your consumer-facing websites, that’s easy, but if you are using AI to summarize 60 pages of conference feedback verbatim down to three [pages]? Do I want the masses and the public to know? Do I want the chatbots to be learning from what I’m doing? As an organization, we’ve licensed Copilot internally so that I can feed information into Copilot, but it’s only learning our information. I’m not feeding it outside. So, if you are actively getting AI involved in any of your business, even if it’s notetaking from your Teams or your Zooms, is it staying internal, or is it feeding all the other chatbots out there? That’s really something you want to think about: where is your information going?

LC: I would like each of our panelists to share how they envision the future of AI and hospitality evolving over the next five to 10 years.

SA: I just had a really great test run with a platform that will create a proposal for a meeting planner that’s with a live bot, and that can answer every question and walk through the space, and it’s all AI driven from the proposal that the hotel created through their system, and it just uploads and completely takes over. The bot is an actual person that looks like the salesperson and walks them around and shows them everything, but they can even live-time answer the questions, the bot can, because of AI. And we’re like, “Do you integrate?” “Yeah, we integrate with everything, as long as we get permission.” So, that’s coming down the road. Stuff like that will allow us to be more efficient, sell at a different level, and hopefully help our sales teams be better at their job.

CB: I think in the next five to 10 years you’re going to see the guest journey evolve both on the group side and on the leisure guest, probably leisure guest first. A lot of our group tools are starting to embrace AI. You can see it with Cvent proposals and all the different things that are available. I do see the guest journey as taking the first big leap into that space. I think one of the key things we have to remember is that all these bots are great, but if somebody wants to speak to a human, you have to make it easy for them to get to a human. I don’t want to push zero 25 times. But it’s going to let the guest who’s awake at three o’clock in the morning trying to plan their vacation, do that on their own time, without having to wait for somebody to be in the office to help them.

LC: We also are beta testing a software that will respond to a text and start the dialog, because we all know that the quicker you answer a lead, the more your percentage goes up. This actually answers the lead through a text, if the person has given the right information for that to happen, and goes all the way to actually setting up the appointment with a real live salesperson.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you look at what Expedia has done so quickly and how nimble they have become in not only using AI and customer service, but also in pricing optimization, they’re able to bring in AI and optimize the expedia.com platform to get the right room to the right traveler at the right time. My question is, how are you changing your strategy in 2025 to maintain a healthy channel mix?

LC: To that point, which is a very good point, they stay ahead of the curve when it comes to things like that. My answer would be, “Like we always have.” We get up every day trying to move that customer to a different channel, a different market segment, but we never can take our eye off the ball. And I’m just going to say, totally off topic for a second here, is that the hotel industry needs to follow the Amazon way. Because I can promise you, Amazon knows me better than my mom, my dad, and my husband put together. And if we could ever figure out how to do hospitality like Amazon does the reminders and the things they serve me up, we would be a much stronger top line for it.