While European hotels are integrating artificial intelligence (AI), adoption is still fragmented.
According to a recent survey conducted by the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland Valais (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), the interest is there, with hoteliers reporting AI can be useful for reservations (68%), marketing (62%), customer relationship management (51%) and data analysis (49%). However, only 41% of hotels said they're actually using AI, and 43% said they're not using it at all.
The survey, which is part of national research project Resilient Tourism, included responses from over 1,500 hotels in Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Italy and Switzerland.
The most commonly adopted apps were for content generation (like ChatGPT or Gemini), with 74% of hotels using these. Online review analysis and dynamic pricing tools were used by 44% and 42%, respectively, but fewer hotels reported using “advanced or infrastructure-heavy technologies” like chatbots (31%), facial recognition (2%), robotics (3%) and waste analytics (8%).
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According to HES-SO Valais-Wallis, this drop-off is confirmation of hotels’ focus on “easy-to-implement, guest-facing tools.”
The survey found that “poor knowledge of available AI solutions” (39%) is the most common barrier to adoption, but high setup costs (35%), technical complexity (34%) and lack of technical skills (32%) also present challenges.
Technical expertise was also flagged in Booking.com's latest European Accommodation Barometer, with 53% of accommodations across Europe reporting lack of technical expertise in their teams as a barrier to AI and digital technology adoption.
These concerns echo comments made last month at HITEC 2025 in Indianapolis, where those in the travel tech space pointed to a slew of barriers, including a lack of understanding of AI, skepticism of “hype cycles” and hoteliers coming from a less consolidated industry.
Additionally, the HES-SO Valais-Wallis survey highlighted concerns such as data privacy and integration hurdles and uncertainty about AI’s return on investment.
But hoteliers who have introduced AI did say it's helpful, rating the overall benefits, on average, at 6.6 on a one-to-10-point scale.
“We see this as a transition from the ‘curiosity phase’ to the ‘operational anchoring phase’ of AI in hospitality,” the HES-SO Valais-Wallis survey report reads. “Hotels are experimenting but not yet scaling. To advance, vendors and tech providers must translate AI into tangible workflows, improving pricing in volatile markets, easing staff shortages and enabling smarter communication.”
The survey also aligned with industry leaders on the idea that there is no “one-size-fits-all" approach to AI.
“AI is going to be best solved, as big data was 10, 15 years ago, by finding use cases that actually have impact, focusing on them and bringing those things to market and getting wins along the way ... This is too big of a thing to think that there's one universal, omni solution for all things AI,” Scott Wilson, president of Sabre Hospitality, told PhocusWire at HITEC 2025.
According to HES-SO Valais-Wallis, smaller hotels will need more plug-and-play tools and training support, while larger entities will need data governance frameworks and change management in order to embrace AI. As the name suggests, midsize hotels are “caught in the middle” and will have to adapt and tackle fragmented tech stacks.