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ChatGPT is one of today's most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. With just a single line of instruction, it can generate information, contents, and assets to be used in various business areas. However, the hotel industry is yet to learn how they can fully maximize the use of ChatGPT in providing excellent customer service and exceptional experience among their guests.
This article will explore how ChatGPT and other Generative AI tech can improve business operations within the hospitality industry.
What is ChatGPT? Everything a hotelier needs to know
There's a lot of hype surrounding ChatGPT these days. Regardless if you have a tech background or not, we'll help you navigate through the technology properly by compiling everything you need to know about Generative AI, GPT-3, and ChatGPT.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that's used to create or generate something new from existing data. It can be used to generate new images, music, or other types of content. It works by using algorithms to identify patterns and trends in existing data and then using those patterns to create something new.
What is GPT-3?
GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by OpenAI. It is a language-processing model that can generate human-like text based on the input it receives. GPT-3 is a powerful tool that can help with tasks such as summarizing text, completing sentences, and generating natural-sounding responses to questions. It can also be used in areas such as natural language processing, machine translation, and question-answering.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a type of technology that enables computer programs to have conversations with people, just like a human would. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand and answer questions and can give advice, tell stories, and generate creative ideas through conversation.
The AI tool is now widely used to write emails, scripts, social media copies, and other online content. Recent studies suggest that the ChatGPT website has been visited 619 million times, with approximately 25 million daily visits. In December 2022 alone, OpenAI's homepage views got a 1561% traffic increase after the launch of ChatGPT. With this kind of popularity, everyone may have read ChatGPT-generated content on the internet at least once.
How will ChatGPT and Generative AI impact hospitality?
Artificial Intelligence is changing the hospitality industry more than you can think. In our recent article about AI use in hotel management, experts suggest that 70% of travel agencies and 60% of hotels will use more AI technology in the following years.
While ChatGPT is better known for generating various marketing content, GPT-3's language model can go beyond writing marketing copies. GPT-3 has achieved a major milestone that no AI had been able to achieve to this extent before–creating human-like texts based on simple instructions. Because of this, the algorithm can be used for a variety of use cases – creating personalized guest experiences, extracting relevant data quickly, generating optimized content, and other tasks to provide excellent customer service.
One of the biggest challenges in the hospitality industry is the constant involvement of human interaction in every process. With ChatGPT, hotels can now utilize advanced language understanding and generation to understand a guest's specific needs, allowing hoteliers to run some workflows on autopilot.
For example, in the past, if someone requested a room for four people, hoteliers had to manually check their PMS, respond to the guest, and offer other upselling services. This process may take more than several minutes for each single customer, which you can even lose with a slight delay in the responses. ChatGPT provides an opportunity to automatically streamline booking and upselling workflows within messaging apps, allowing for instant service of guest inquiries. Your staff can save time and provide fast guest service, which will result in high guest satisfaction.
Research suggests that 80.8% of customers abandon their bookings on travel websites after making an inquiry. With ChatGPT-powered chatbots, guests receive answers to their requests about a hotel's location, facilities, amenities, and services quickly without using up the resources of a business. A win-win situation for everyone that reduces the risk of loosing a potential customer in the booking journey!
Generate actionable insights from guest feedback
Marketers have already been using ChatGPT to generate numerous marketing assets (e.g. hotel descriptions for booking sites, website content etc.) for hotel brands. However, GPT-3 could be used in more advanced use cases, such as analyzing customer feedback, reviews, ratings, and social media comments.
In this example, a GPT-3 powered AI review reply assistant extracts a precise summary of the key information from a guest review. By aggregating and categorizing such information (manually or automatically) hotels can identify the most critical areas within a property to improve.
By automatically extracting insights from customer feedback and social media, hotel managers can gain insights on which amenities to add, which facilities to improve, and what services to offer next. However, it's essential to generate enough customer feedback to do this. To learn more about how to gather guest feedback, click here.
What are the limitations of ChatGPT?
The power of ChatGPT is undeniable, but the technology also has its drawbacks that you should be aware of. Here are some of the most notable limitations of ChatGPT:
Outdated knowledge base
ChatGPT's overall algorithm is yet to be updated, as it's still limited to data until 2021. This means it can't answer current questions on new topics. In this example, ChatGPT has yet to record Argentina's win in the 2022 World Cup.
Factually incorrect answers
One of the major limitations to keep in mind when working with ChatGPT is the possibility of giving factually incorrect answers, although the answers always seem human and read well. Members of the active GPT-3 community have referred to this as "hallucinating" or "lying". In fact, StackOverflow has banned ChatGPT from their platform due to the potential harm incorrect answers generated by ChatGPT may cause to their website and users.
Inconsistency to brand voice
While some Generative AI technologies can be synched to other IT systems (e.g., your business CRM), GPT-3 tools are typically not consistent with your brand voice. Since ChatGPT is more likely to generate content that may not fit your ideal writing style, it's imperative that your hoteliers still supervise the content generated.
These limitations of ChatGPT don't make it useless for businesses. It just means that no AI can replace people. They are only here to help hoteliers create better working processes and provide better guest experiences.
Implementing ChatGPT in the hotel industry
Here's how hoteliers are now using ChatGPT to improve their operations:
Customer service
Banks and financial tech companies are now integrating GPT-3 into chatbots or virtual assistants to automate repetitive tasks–the same goes for the hotel industry. GPT-3 can handle common and mundane customer service tasks such as the booking process, inquiries on amenities, room requests, and more, saving time and the brain power of your hotel staff.
The most popular use of Generative AI and ChatGPT in the hospitality industry is through the use of chatbots. At the most basic level, a chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation (either written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital devices as if they were communicating with a real person. Through chatbots, hotels get to automate common customer service channels–their website, social media accounts, and even phone operations.
Recent research suggests that 80% of people have interacted with a chatbot at some point. And contrary to popular belief, chatbots aren't really that new. Chatbots have been around since the early 1960s, when computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA. ELIZA was the first chatbot that could engage in an interactive conversation with a hum an user. Since then, chatbots have evolved dramatically, and they are now used in a variety of applications from customer service to healthcare to education. With the rise of Generative AI, current chatbot solutions achieved 90% satisfaction rates. ChatGPT is expected to significantly enhance chatbots by better understanding customer intent, even for complex requests, and generating more natural and human-like responses.
Data processing
Like other businesses, hotels continuously face the daunting task of processing numerous documents and data to extract specific information. GPT-3's language model can extract specific information about bookings, supplies, or guests from innumerable records and profiles. This will save time and resources by reducing manual data entry.
For instance, when your staff is running through the records of your supplies, ChatGPT can help quickly summarize datasets. This will help your staff analyze your supply in reference to guest demands and would enable them to plan your next re-stocking process quickly and efficiently.
Marketing
Writers, content creators, and marketers use ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools to create winning marketing campaigns. ChatGPT helps marketers craft blog posts, social media copies, emails, and video scripts. For hotels, also AI-generated replies to online reviews can positively affect the brand's online reputation.
In our recent article about optimizing online presence, we've learned that 95% of consumers read reviews before making an online purchase, and 77% of people are likelier to purchase from businesses whose owners respond to reviews. That is why every hotel should aim for a 100% response rate to guest reviews. Using an AI review response generator, hoteliers can achieve this in a fraction of the time.
Idea generation and strategy creation
ChatGPT can also assist you in generating ideas of how to optimize business operations.
This example shows how a hotel manager can use ChatGPT to instantly access the best practices of leading hotels. By doing so, they can create effective business strategies to attract more customers and foster brand loyalty among previous guests.
In the following example, ChatGPT provides instant tips on how to generate more reviews on TripAdvisor for luxury hotels. While the generated ideas still need to be contextualized based on the hotel’s target market and overall demographic, they provide useful ideas to hotel managers.
3 tools that utilize GPT-3 to assist hoteliers:
- MARA AI Review Reply Assistant - Crafts fully optimized responses to online reviews.
- DialogShift - Automates the response to frequent guest inquiries.
- VOICEplug - Enables hotel restaurants and cafés to offer an interactive and conversational ordering experience.
MARA AI Review Response Generator
MARA AI Review Response Generator crafts well-written and fully-optimized responses to online reviews to boost your online credibility. Rather than following a generic template, the algorithm extracts key points from every review and drafts a personalized response. Its easy-to-use interface enables hoteliers to increase their response rates without sacrificing time and brainpower that could be allocated to other tasks.
A Guest Experience Manager at The Westin London City says that MARA's language algorithm generates precise, intuitive, and eloquent replies that create a positive impression among patrons.
What is the difference between ChatGPT and MARA for generating review responses?
ChatGPT is certainly capable of producing well-written texts. The main advantages of MARA's AI Review Reply Assistant over ChatGPT for generating review responses is that it follows best practices and produces factually correct responses. On the other hand, ChatGPT can sometimes generate responses that do not adhere to best practices or contain inaccuracies. This may lead to suggestions that require manual rewriting, making the process more time-consuming. You can think of MARAs AI review reply assistant as a technology similar to ChatGPT, but specialized in crafting perfect responses to hotel reviews by following best practices on how to respond to guest feedback.
Factually correct responses
As previously stated, ChatGPT does not have specific information about your hotel, which may result in factually incorrect answers. For instance, if a guest complains about a hot room, ChatGPT might suggest turning on an air conditioning unit that is not available in the room. This could exacerbate the situation and drive away potential guests who are browsing your online reviews or lead to wrong expectations and even more unhappy guests.
With MARA, hoteliers can avoid using common, standard templates and instead write personalized responses that perfectly fit each review. You can even tell MARA’s AI, how to react to recurring review topics, with the Smart Snippets feature. When a review topic is identified, your assistant will naturally incorporate the information provided in the response snippet without repeating the exact wording multiple times. You can think of it as teaching your AI assistant the specifics about your hotel - something that can’t be found in any GPT-3-based alternative.
Here is an example: Instead of providing a generic response to a complaint about construction noise, your review assistant can now inform your guests that you took action and handled the situation by limiting construction to the hours of 9am to 5pm.
Following best practices
Another advantage of MARA over ChatGPT for generating review responses is that it follows best practices.
For instance, when a guest complains about dirty rooms, ChatGPT sometimes repeats the negative phrase "dirty room" in the response, such as "We apologize that you had a dirty room." This can further emphasize the negative aspect of the review. On the other hand, MARA shifts the review response to a more professional and positive tone by using positive language (e.g., "At our hotel, we make it our priority to maintain the cleanliness of our rooms to the highest possible standard. We apologize for falling short in your case with regards to that matter.").
DialogShift
DialogShift is more than just a chatbot tool. It offers an easy and efficient guest communication process from Google search to checkout, with flexible integration options to various social media websites and other guest apps. Through DialogShift, managers can maximize self-service automation to unload mundane and repetitive tasks from their hoteliers.
DialogShift uses Generative AI to create a very human-sounding chatbot that handles guest requests. This is especially important for the hospitality industry as guests look forward to personal interactions that make them feel understood and validated before booking their accommodation.
The Head of Sales & Marketing at Welcome Hotels Schweiz says DialogShift has enabled them to respond promptly to inquiries. This gives them a significantly high conversion rate, as guests can directly book their stay after their inquiry.
VOICEPlug
While restaurants mainly use VOICEPlug, the voice AI solution can also be integrated into the phone system and online ordering CRM of hotel-based cafes. The tool enables the staff to accept customer orders using natural voice conversations and authentic language commands.
Like MARA AI and DialogShift, VoicePlug uses Generative AI to deliver a natural chat experience. This way, hotel-based restaurants can upsell their products and create dynamic menus without losing the human touch that’s vital for the hospitality industry.
As of this writing, VOICEplug declares a 90% reduction in customer abandonment rate, a 75% reduction in per-order costs, and a 35% increase in average check size per order among their partners.
Generative AI, GPT-3, and ChatGPT are changing the hotel industry landscape.
There's no denying that ChatGPT will revolutionize how hotels connect with guests. So, instead of dismissing its benefits, it's best to be at the forefront of the trend. Create a competitive advantage by leveraging Generative AI technologies to deliver nothing less than an exceptional guest experience to your patrons.
