NATIONAL REPORT—As hotels experiment with adding voice-activation solutions to hotel rooms, greater consumer adoption of voice technology is happening every day. Smartphones, laptops and other consumer devices all have voice capabilities. Devices like Amazon’s Echo can increasingly be found in consumers’ homes—and voice solutions can also be found in other places, like cars, as well. As this continues to evolve, could it have an effect on how consumers think about booking? It’s too early to know the answer—but the hotel industry is thinking about it.
Certainly, some guests are using voice solutions to help enable booking. At both the recent Choice Hotels International and La Quinta Inn & Suites conferences, voice activation was a topic of discussion. Julie Cary, EVP and CMO, La Quinta Holdings Inc., noted during the conference that the company had seen significant shifts in industry-wide behaviors, beginning summer 2016. For instance, generic searches—enabled by voice—were on the rise. (By example, instead of a search for “La Quinta hotels in Dallas” potential guests searched for “hotels near me” or “hotels in Dallas.”)
“This is a game changer for all hotel brands, as generic searches have lower returns and the OTAs bid aggressively for these types of searches,” she said, noting revenue that comes from search is five times higher than the brand’s top corporate account.
When Hotel Business asked Cary about the implications of voice search, she said, “I think we’ll see some pretty big changes with voice search and artificial intelligence (AI). We don’t even know yet the impact of Alexa, Google Home, etc., where you say, ‘Book me a room at La Quinta,’ as this continues to progress. I think we’ll continue to see changes in how customers shop and book and how we, as an industry, adapt to that because it is the basis of the behavior that’s changing that we have to then adapt to. We’re definitely seeing voice search having an impact and it will continue to evolve.” As such, the company is engaging in beta tests with Google.
Similarly, Choice has seen similar results, noting during its conference that at the end of March, more than one in 10 searches used voice. The company has been experimenting with a way to book hotels through voice, including Alexa and Facebook Messenger. Robert McDowell, chief commercial officer, said, “We need to keep a sharp eye to the future—looking at Siri and Alexa—so that we keep [Choice] hotels in front of where customers’ eyes and voices are going.”
President/COO Pat Pacious elaborated, “We started looking at this about a year ago: What is it going to look like? Our thinking is it’s going to be another sales channel. Back in the old days, you had to call the hotel directly, then you went to 24/7 toll-free numbers, then the web, now it’s mobile. We don’t think it’ll overtake the others, but it’ll be another sales channel.”
Armand Rabinowitz, senior director of strategy and workgroups, HTNG, noted that booking by voice faces more challenges than in-room voice solutions, particularly in the higher tiers. “Sales was the original intent of the Amazon Alexa platform, but ordering travel is quite complicated,” he said, noting this is especially true for hotels. “Booking travel, unless you go somewhere very frequently, is definitely going to need to have a screen or some kind of extremely intelligent thing that’s reading your mind to bring voice into the booking path.”
But, he noted, the path becomes much clearer for one-night stays in drive-to destinations. “That future is coming. “Apple’s recent announcement about the release of their always-listening voice device, the HomePod, makes it clear the voice interface is maturing. This future could leverage something like Apple’s CarPlay and the forthcoming improvements to Siri for HomePod. Systems like these are not that smart yet, but because you can’t look at a screen when you’re driving, it would be smart to provide a service to enable booking a hotel with an EV charging station in 100 miles, for example,” he said.
For its part, Expedia Inc. is testing the waters. David Fleischman, VP of global product, Expedia, said that the point of booking sites is to match the traveler to the right product for them. “We have a philosophy when we do our products, especially things like voice, AI and chatbots that are a little newer in the western world—in Asia, it’s a little bit different—but we’ve talked about slow and then with overwhelming speed. The idea is we want to experiment and understand how our travelers think about these technologies and what they’re comfortable with,” he explained. “It’s going to evolve over time.”
Echoing Rabinowitz’s concerns, he said, “Lodging is a very visual, immersive experience: Will it work without voice? Maybe not today, but I would never say never. It depends on where the technology goes. It’s early enough that we want to experiment everywhere we can.
“One way to think about voice is it’s a much more natural way to interact with a product,” Fleischman continued. “One of the things we talk about is if we had had this technology 20 years ago when Expedia started, would any travel site look the way it does?” he asked. “Is it natural to say I’d like a hotel here on these dates with this number of people in a very structured way, or is travel more of an unstructured discussion?”
Expedia is looking at two types of voice- and AI-enabled solutions: helping consumers to buy something and giving them help. “That could be as simple as ‘I want to reconfirm my booking’ or ‘I have to change something,’” he said. “That’s a basic scenario we’re working to support.”
Before hotels are able to truly do voice bookings, AI will need to be there. “You’re not going to be able to structure a conversation up front, especially when you want to unbind your travelers from the limitations they have today on how they have to ask questions,” Fleischman said. “That’ll take a series of technological innovations and people behind it for a while. I don’t think you’ll get to a point in the near future where AI handles the more complex questions.”
For his part, Pacious gave his potential vision of the future and echoed the need for robust technology. “From a technology perspective and understanding who is going to be on the other end of that, what probably will end up happening, I think, is you create a profile of your most loyal guests and know what type of room they want, the brand they stay with, the price point they want to pay—then you’ll be able to easily serve that up, but that artificial intelligence needs to know that. And that is information that changes rapidly and it’s information that has to get processed quickly, so the backend systems behind all of this have to be upgraded in order to participate,” he said.
Adding that it’s something Choice has been working on, he added, “Data has to move at a speed that these old systems can’t keep up with. How the consumer is going to interact with voice is pretty nascent, so we’re still looking at it. Our technology folks have already figured out how to do it; now it’s just a question of how do you bring it to market? But we have to stay ahead of the game to bring customers to [our franchisees’]door. Thinking about where that customer will be and what channel they’re going to want to buy through is pretty important for us.”
Fleischman said, “This space is so early that we want to continue to understand what works for our travelers and how we further the cause of making travel simple and accessible to as many people as possible, matching those travelers to the right products. I think there’s a lot of potential here, but I don’t know anybody has quite figured out exactly how it will work or which platform will work. It’s the wild west in some regards. There’s no dominant player yet, which is a cool place because you can experiment pretty rapidly. But it also means it’s a little longer to draw conclusions.
“It’s an interesting time to start framing and helping people understand how to use these products for travel. We have a unique opportunity to do that, but it is early, and that’s what’s fun about it—trying to understand the space,” he concluded.