Guest contributor: Gopi Kallayil is Chief Business Strategist for AI at Google, board member and advisor to CEOs, TEDx speaker, and former McKinsey consultant.
The answers were surprising. First, it determined that guests cared more about breakfast than fine dining experiences. They’d been investing heavily in prestigious dinner restaurants with celebrity chefs, but guests really wanted an excellent breakfast. Second, 90% of breakfast orders were modified.
So they made a bold decision: they removed the breakfast menu entirely. Through my work at Google and the years I’ve spent in Silicon Valley, I’ve witnessed multiple technological breakthroughs—from the internet to mobile phones to smartphones. And I’ve observed one consistent pattern that AI is now confirming: travel and hospitality are always among the first industries impacted by new technology.
Why? Because while the “product” of travel is physical and experiential, everything leading up to it is purely informational. You can’t walk into a store and try on a vacation. The entire experience is built on research, communication, and planning, which is exactly the kind of information-dense processes that technology transforms.
Put simply, if you want to know how a new technology will affect your industry, look at what’s happening in travel and hospitality. That’s where you’re likely headed.
I’ve identified four specific dimensions where AI is currently transforming the hospitality and travel industries. Understanding these patterns will help you recognize similar opportunities in your own industry. The real prize will go to those who can identify new opportunities that hit on all four dimensions simultaneously.
Dimension 1: The Customer Journey
The traditional vacation planning process involves days or weeks of research—scrolling through articles, watching videos, browsing Instagram, and reading reviews. The exploration phase alone can consume hours, and it’s a significant enough barrier that it prevents some trips from ever coming to fruition.
AI is collapsing this entire process from hours or days into minutes.
I recently demonstrated an AI assistant to a room of hospitality executives. I held up my phone and said, “I’m planning a vacation to Marbella, Spain. Recommendations for luxury resorts?” The AI responded conversationally, listing the Marbella Club Hotel, Puente Romano Beach Resort, and Nobu Hotel Marbella—immediately providing context about each property.
Then I asked, “Does Puente Romano have yoga classes? What about a spa?” The AI provided detailed information instantly. This research used to require visiting multiple websites, reading dozens of reviews, and possibly calling properties directly.
Imagine a world where you have an AI agent that knows all of your preferences, travel history, schedule, and goals. Planning an entire vacation could be as simple as speaking a few sentences—from finding the cheapest flight that maximizes your reward points to developing daily itineraries with bucket list items.
AI is already removing friction from travel planning, and we’re going to see similar trends across all industries.
Dimension 2: AI-Powered Marketing
Marketing in hospitality has traditionally focused on maximizing immediate bookings—getting people to book right now. But AI now enables many different approaches by synthesizing vast amounts of data and generating insights that would take humans thousands of hours.
Hilton Hotels provides a perfect case study. Instead of treating all customers the same, they asked: What if we could identify exactly what each type of guest actually values? They analyzed millions of Hilton Honors loyalty program profiles and booking behaviors, enabling far more granular segmentation than ever before.
Their AI models could identify patterns like which guests value breakfast inclusion versus lowest price, or which corporate accounts show potential for weekend travel. They used these insights to deliver personalized pricing and targeted promotions to their customers—in other words, they could reliably send the right offer to the right guest at the right time.
The result was a 5-8% increase in revenue, alongside higher guest satisfaction because customers received offers that actually matched their preferences.1 The AI helped them spend their marketing budget more wisely by understanding what different guests truly wanted and tailoring their approach accordingly.
Dimension 3: Service Delivery and Guest Experience
At this point in my life, there’s no hotel chain I haven’t stayed at. Given the amount of data these companies have, they should know quite a bit about me.
Yet when I check into a typical hotel chain, the front desk clerk often treats me like a complete stranger. They don’t know how to pronounce my name. They spend three minutes explaining the same checkout procedure I’ve heard hundreds of times. They don’t know that I prefer a high floor and frequently request a late checkout.
The data is absolutely there. They’re just not connecting the dots.
Now, some luxury hotels already do this manually. But the reality is that AI will bring this level of personalized service to every hotel chain.
Imagine a hotel where the front desk automatically sees an AI-generated summary as you check in: “Based on past stays, this guest is interested in local yoga studios, prefers high floors, usually requests late checkout, and appreciates vegetarian restaurant recommendations. They stayed at our London property last week, so skip the checkout policy.”
That simple piece of AI-generated intelligence transforms the entire interaction. The data and the AI systems we have today are already capable of doing this. And there are even more opportunities for similar transformations that we simply can’t predict.
For example, the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles recently made a major change based on AI insights. They built a tool called Metis to read thousands of reviews across platforms and identify patterns. They asked it one simple question: “What do our guests care about most?”. Now, when you sit down for breakfast at The Beverly Hills Hotel, the server simply asks what you’d like to eat. You can ask for anything, and they’ll make it. How’s that for luxury?
Dimension 4: Operational Excellence
Behind the scenes, AI is transforming hotel operations in ways guests may never see directly but experience through better service, lower prices, and improved sustainability.
I was talking recently with the operations manager of a resort who described one of the challenges that keeps him up at night. “One week, we’ll have the entire property booked with families on vacation. The next week, a company will book the whole hotel for a corporate offsite, and the operational dynamics are completely different.”
When you have leisure guests, the pool is packed—you need lots of pool attendants and towels. Families are everywhere, kids are running around, and the casual restaurant gets slammed at lunch. The bar is dead at night.
When you have a corporate group doing team-building and strategy sessions, it’s almost the exact opposite. The pool stays quiet, the bar is busy, and coffee service needs to run continuously during the day for meeting breaks. Suddenly, you need eight bartenders instead of three and one pool attendant instead of four.
Right now, hotels handle this through manual planning and educated guesswork. Yet AI can predict with remarkable accuracy exactly what staffing and resources will be needed based on guest profiles, historical patterns, booking data, and external factors. This means better service for guests, lower costs for hotels, and less stressful work for operations teams.
What This Means Beyond Hospitality
Whether you’re in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, or professional services, you have customer journeys where AI can reduce friction, marketing opportunities where AI can identify high-value customers, service delivery touchpoints where personalization drives loyalty, and operational processes where AI can dramatically improve efficiency.
The specific applications differ, but the transformation pattern remains identical.
AI will disrupt and transform nearly every industry. Travel and hospitality are simply where we’re seeing it first and most clearly, just as we have with every other technological breakthrough. By understanding what’s happening in travel right now, you can anticipate and prepare for similar transformations in your own sector.
The true winners will be the non-linear thinkers who can identify new products, services—even entirely new industries—that capitalize on all four dimensions simultaneously.
Which of these four dimensions represents the biggest opportunity for your organization?
