Noone saw this coming. Not the consultants, not the software vendors, not the hotels themselves. Absolutely nobody. The arrival of generative AI has created a completely insane need: an almost unlimited appetite for data. All data, on every single hotel. And yet hotels are completely unprepared for this.
A guest once asked this of Velma, our AI assistant, in a hotel in Switzerland: “Animal welfare matters a great deal to me. That’s why I only eat lobster that has not been dropped alive into boiling water. How do you prepare yours?”
Take a moment to savour the question. Because it says everything. This guest isn’t being ridiculous: he has simply got used to ChatGPT answering everything, all the time, about anything. It doesn’t occur to him that an AI might not be able to respond to this question. But frequently, hotel AIs are totally unable to respond.
And here is the paradox which no hotelier wants to hear: the large models try to answer everything because they have been force-fed so much data that they are at the point of very frequently hallucinating. The other models most often dont have enough data to respond. And the only one very important point which matters to you : in hospitality, hallucinating is out of the question: a wrong answer about breakfast, an allergy or a cancellation policy is unforgivable.
So is the lobster cooking method included? No. And for good reason:
So what needs to be done? Every piece of data about your hotel has to be structured and collected absolutely all of it, truly all of it. That is exactly what Q-Data does: 4200 structured pieces of information per property, the deepest database in existence for hotels globally. And, as mad as it sounds, it is still growing constantly and heading for 5,000.
That data falls into three families, and two of them should no longer worry you:
Hot data, sorted. Cold data, sorted forever. That leaves the lukewarm, and this is where it jams: the special offers, the parking and taxi rates, the restaurant, bar, spa and rooftop menus all have to be updated. Continuously. Without missing a single one.
Mission impossible, you will say. Yes it may seem like it, except that you have no choice. Because this data no longer exists merely to decorate an Excel sheet: it can and must feed everything, in order – the website, the OTAs, the GDS, the bed banks, Google, the PMS, the booking engine, and now every AI. Thanks to Claude, a hotel can even publish its brochure, its PDFs, its fact sheets and its commercial proposals straight from that same database.
The result: YOU NEED : all of your hotel’s data, everywhere, available at the same time. This is no longer a fantasy, it already exists. A little work at the start to get the rocket ready, and after that you can ask it for the moon.
To see exactly what that means, go and look at the Mercure Majestic La Baule website. In fact, that site doesn’t really exist. Claude and Q-Data generate that site in real time. Entirely. And when we say entirely, we are not cheating on the word: data, text, images, video, all of it. Nothing was typed, framed or edited by a human hand, and the whole thing is optimised for Google, Gemini, ChatGPT and the rest.
And while you are wondering whether this is bluff, that same site is updating itself, on its own, in real time, through Claude and Q-Data. No webmaster to chase, no ticket left sitting for three weeks, no “we’ll look at it next week”.
The revolution is not coming tomorrow. It is already here. Where do you stand?
The parallel is embarrassingly obvious. Your rates: you first managed them by gut feel. Then came the revenue management software. Then, for many, came the complete outsourcing to specialists. That is exactly what is already happening with data: hotels are now handing their entire data operation to a dedicated agency, because data has become the fuel of the AI world.
If you have understood this article, you already know what you have to do.
For everyone else: good luck with Booking and Expedia. You are going to need them for a long time yet.
PS: as for the guest who cared about animal welfare, the simplest thing would be not to eat them at all. I dream of the day Velma can answer that.
But nobody’s perfect (for the sharper readers who got to the end and got the reference).
© Image: Shutterstock
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