Personalise your guests journey with AI

Today we are talking about how you as a host could utilize AI technologies to personalize suggestions for your guests and the benefit that this will bring. Now, there's a lot of talk in the industry about AI at the moment and I'm really excited today to really dive into this and really unpack what AI is in general. So we are on the Spotlight series and we're shining the light on products and services that you as a host and hospitality owner need to know about. My name is Liam Carolan, I'm Mark Simpson's co host. And you're on the Boostly podcast, of course, which gives you the tools, the tactics, the trainings, but most importantly, the confidence to go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we're joined by a very, very special guest who's an absolute expert in this subject of AI. So please welcome along Evan Dalgo. He's the, I think business development Adaptive, which was formerly Jarvis ML, you may have known them as. This is a platform which is offering AI powered personalization engine to brands selling products, services and experience. So we're going to unpack what that actually means in just a second. But let's first of all welcome along. Evan, thank you for being here.

Thanks, Liam. Yeah. What you and Mark are building over at Boostly, between the engagement you have from the community and actual products, you're really just getting people excited about driving, direct bookings and best practices in E commerce. And I love it all. So I'm excited to be here.

Let's start off with very basic. Evan, first of all, if you can give yourself an introduction and an introduction to Adaptive as well, please.

Sure. Yeah. So Evan Dalgo, the only Evan Dolgo on the planet. I'm the head of hospitality over at Adaptive, formerly Jarvis ML. And what we do is we provide machine learning personalization to vacation rentals. So long story short, what that means is we've all been trained to use personalization. When you go on Amazon and you like a product, or let's say you go on Amazon, you immediately see a bunch of products in front of you. You start clicking on products that Amazon is serving you, next thing you know you have 10 things in your cart that you didn't anticipate. That's because Amazon knows us better than we know ourselves. And they do that with machine learning personalization where they show you things that you like based on your behaviors, your preferences and affinities and, and then they keep serving you more things based on what you click on and they don't do what's wrong and they double down on what's right. So we do that for direct booking businesses.

What really is AI and why should we care?

Yeah, so AI means a lot of things. I think companies about a decade ago started saying AI because it was cool. And then real quick it wasn't cool and everyone just sort of just used it too much and there's just a mistrust because it wasn't real AI. You're just saying it when anything has to do with SaaS or tech. So the idea of actual artificial intelligence is how do you take a ton of data and utilize it for an output that can be repeated again and again? So how do we take data from all over the place from your direct booking website, your reviews, your PMS system, your marketing cloud, whatever you have, plug it into one place, which is the machine learning engine or the brain. And in that brain, how do you start drawing connections, meaningful connections like purchasing power per guest, preferences and affinities per guest, Internet behaviors, marketing, things like that. And then from there you personalize an output or you streamline an operation, whether it's through automation or it's just even understanding your customer a layer deeper and then giving them a call and asking them something, just going the level, the step ahead. So it's the idea of how do we take this data and make it useful? And I'm a firm believer that AI is not going to directly replace humans for the next 20 plus years. Maybe in some cases it will, but for the most part, humans will have their jobs for the next 20 years. It's going to be the humans that use AI that are going to replace other humans that don't use AI.

One of the questions I'd have for you is where in hospitality at the moment, is there already, is there already utilization of AI?

Yeah. So I would say the easiest is personalization regarding content on the sites. OTAs have been doing it for probably 10 years at this point. It's gotten more sophisticated and more predictive and there is a sense of urgency here because we're losing cookies. You already lost that in Europe a long ago. But basically it's becoming much harder to follow your guests on the Internet. It's becoming much more of an anonymous environment. So everyone is just trying to collect this direct booking data because that's the best way that they can get the most data. And every time they come back to the site over the course of the week to make that booking, you're able to keep personalizing further and further. So OTAs have been doing that for at least a decade. Um, I think that's the easiest output. I think everyone in their head thinks pricing. They think, oh, the, the airlines are personalizing pricing, or the, the OTAs are personalizing pricing. It's a much harder problem to solve than people give it credit for. So I don't think that's happening as much as people think just yet, but it will, it definitely will.

What is that guest journey like? If, if a deal is, is personalized to them, what sort of things would they expect to see?

Yeah, so first, before you even consider personalization, you have to have a direct booking website and enough properties. So I want to emphasize that because the idea of personalization is you're reducing cognitive load, you're reducing the, the friction to get to the end goal, which is the property you want. And if you have like 10, 20, 30 properties, by the time you put in filter dates, a human's brain can sift through a handful of properties, no problem. But by the time you have 60, 70, 100 properties, that's a little bit overload. So the idea is how do we sort order the best properties at the front, and as they scroll down, it'll become least likely they book. And the idea is that all the best properties are at the top.

What would you say is the biggest threat then or the biggest challenge in terms of, in terms of AI in general? Is there any situation that would happen where people won't end up taking up this, this technology? I mean, I can't see it myself, but is there any threats at all to. I guess first of all the AI tech which is coming along, and then also for hosts who don't use it.

Yeah. So let's just compare with the OTAs, because in my opinion, let's just copy and paste what's working and the OTAs have figured it out. So when it comes to AI with OTAs, right now they're all using it. If they have funding, they're using AI to do it. Because that's just, that's what needs to happen. That's what Amazon has proved. That's what all of social media has proved. Personalization gets people coming back again and again and increases lifetime value of your customers. And that's just a cold, hard fact. Every single E commerce company uses personalization. There's no excuse for, for hospitality companies that have enough data not to be using it. So my biggest fear, which I think is already happening, is that people just don't want to use AI because they still are like pen and paper mentality for Example, we spoke with a property manager, several hundred properties and they have 70% occupancy and they have all the right ingredients. All they would have to do is sign us off. We would work with their web development company. We could have personalization up in a matter of two, three weeks. They're like, we don't want to use AI. Like why? I, I will, I will teach you as to how you should use it, but all the OTAs are using it. Have you asked yourself why they're using it? And my fear is that, not my fear what's going to happen is there's going to be roll ups that use AI because I'll tell you right now, we're talking to several of them and they're centralizing all their operations in this mass data they have, they're going to have databases of a million guests that they can just keep coming back again and again for the lowest acquisition cost. So they're going to keep acquiring these, these non direct booking businesses that are hooked on the OTAs and consolidation is just going to speed up because they're not going to be able to compete.

I really get the message from this is that, you know, don't underestimate AI technology and true AI technology more to the point, which is cool. So thank you so much, Evan for, for being part of this and for spending your time with us. We've gone live on Facebook so I'm sure there'd be a few people who have seen this on here and also obviously we've, we've seen. Sorry, we're broadcasting to our podcast listeners as well on YouTube. So thank you so much for everybody listening into this. We know there's a lot of places you can put your attention and we thank you for spending it with Boostly. I hope you've enjoyed this Spotlight series episode. So Evan, that's, that's. Was there anything I missed or any final thoughts just before we close things off?

Nope, that was great. And I look forward to more educational opportunities to keep pushing the bar.

Awesome. Thank you very much, buddy. And bye for now.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard on the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.