Cloudbeds is aiming to connect all facets of hotel operations using artificial intelligence.
The company has launched a "smart hospitality engine" called Cloudbeds Intelligence that uses causal and multimodal AI to surface insights, predictions and recommendations for hoteliers.
Causal AI understands the cause and effect relationship of various factors in a hotel's operations while multimodal AI integrates richer data such as images, video and text to equip staff with more information to sell rooms and other services.
The company's CEO Adam Harris said Cloudbeds Intelligence is analyzing billions of data points on future demand signals including events, competitor rates, national holidays and search information and combining them with a property's own data.
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Harris said that while hoteliers can do this today it is in a very "challenged way" because of the silos that exist but that properties can potentially unlock many more revenue opportunities, especially once a reservation is made, if they can bring the data together.
"We're trying to unlock the cause and effect inside a hotel. The cause would be there's a pricing opportunity or a demand opportunity. The effect is, how do I maximize revenue?" he said.
"To do that, I need to be informed with everything. I need to understand what's going on in the market. I need to understand what's going on in my property. I need to understand how many people I need to staff. I need to understand whether or not I have more repeat travelers or people who are coming for the first time. And, if I can look at all of that, including our AI engine looking at photos and descriptions of hotel rooms to then match and do a calculation to try to figure out whether or not a room is going to be sold more or less, we can help up our property owners forecast to drive more revenue."
He believes hotels can benefit from lots of "micro adjustments" that can increase occupancy and drive revenue rather than just relying on the 10 or so major events coming to their region or city annually. He also believes the industry, traditionally slow to invest in new technologies, is ready for this.
“I think hotels have been asking for this since COVID,” he said.
“They've been looking for ways to make decisions more efficiently. How do I act more efficiently and how do I look at the sheer increase in costs that our industry has faced over the last, you know, four years, and that's not going to change.”
The technology aims to enable unified commercial strategies for hoteliers by bringing together insights from distribution and marketing, guest experience and operations.
For example, if a hotel knows it has a period of low demand coming up, the technology can recommend action that includes a rate reduction combined with a targeted email campaign.
“What Cloudbeds Intelligence does is far beyond traditional forecasting... It can help pick the optimum combination of strategies to drive the property’s profitability,” said Amit Popat, head of machine learning at Cloudbeds.
“Whether it’s mitigating cancellations with predictive marketing suggestions or personalizing guest experience with tailored upsell recommendations, our supercharged platform will help hoteliers take the best actions to meet
their goals. This level of decision intelligence simply hasn’t been available until now.”
The company claims Cloudbeds Intelligence eliminates silos and can boost occupancy rates by 10% and RevPAR by 15%.
Going forward, Harris wants partner companies including IDeaS and SiteMinder to add their data into the forecasting engine. He also said it would be expanded to help hotels make decisions around additional areas such as housekeeping needs and daily staffing levels.