AI Marketing Tips: Best Practices & Insights from Hospitality Experts

“Incorporating AI into hotel marketing activities can empower the hospitality industry. However, to fully unlock the potential of AI, hotels need to develop a clear AI strategy and seek guidance from outside experts. This external perspective is essential for seeing things differently within the organisation and achieving the full benefits of AI. Experimenting with a few use cases per department, continuously learning, and measuring results are crucial steps in this journey.

AI can help hotels personalise communication by analysing data from past interactions to predict guest preferences and send tailored offers. For example, hotels can customise email marketing campaigns to match individual interests and use AI-driven chatbots for instant, personalised responses, enhancing customer service and engagement. Additionally, AI allows hotels to process vast amounts of data quickly and accurately. By analysing booking patterns, guest feedback, and market trends, hotels can make data-driven decisions that optimise their offerings and improve guest satisfaction. AI can also analyse social media trends and sentiment, allowing hotels to adjust marketing strategies in real time, based on guest feedback and market changes.

Targeted advertising capabilities are significantly enhanced with AI. By analysing user behaviour and preferences, AI ensures advertisements reach the right audience at the right time, increasing campaign effectiveness. Hotels can leverage AI to segment their audience by demographics, behaviour, and preferences to create highly targeted ad campaigns. AI tools can assist in content creation, generating blog posts, social media updates, and other marketing materials, saving time and ensuring consistent and relevant messaging. For instance, AI can be used to create personalised travel guides and itineraries for guests, providing valuable content that enhances their stay.

AI also automates marketing campaign management, from email distribution to social media posting, ensuring timely and consistent communication. This automation frees marketing teams to focus on strategy and creativity. AI optimises resource allocation by predicting market trends and guest demand, allowing hotels to allocate their marketing budget effectively for the highest ROI. During high-demand periods, AI can dynamically adjust strategies and pricing, maximizing occupancy and revenue.

Incorporating AI into hotel marketing is not just about adopting new technology; it’s about transforming the way the organisation thinks and operates.”

“The following was in an email to me recently from Superhuman AI. It is credited to Team GPT. I thought it was brilliant yet simple, and I wondered why I had not already thought of it.

Prompt: Using [insert topic here, e.g., ‘sustainable fashion’] as the central seed keyword, identify 15 long-tail keywords that potential customers might use when they look for [insert topic here again, e.g., ‘eco-friendly and affordable clothing options’].

Follow-Up Prompt: Which three of the 15 long-tail keywords do you think have the most commercial intent, and why?

You can adapt the prompt to your specific SEO needs. You can also keep asking the model different follow-up questions and include guidelines around formatting and analysis. This was not my own personal inspiration, but is such a good idea, I think it is worth passing along.”

“AI still is a slippery slope. If you keep up to date with the news, you’ll discover that there is still a lot of room for improvement. There are problems with copyright and false information – amongst other challenges. Furthermore, the transparency of what happens with all of the data put in to AI still leaves much to be desired.

Although we believe in the power of AI, we would suggest to use it wisely, refrain from putting in classified information and always double check outcomes. For now, it is more of an inspirational tool to help get new ideas.”

“When discussing AI, we need to specify which sub-categories of AI are we talking about: generative AI, predictive AI, general AI, machine learning, etc. In hotel marketing, I see the following uses of generative AI like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropocene, etc. in hospitality and travel:

• enhanced chatbots for the hotel website to handle trip planning and customer service
• virtual assistants
• content translations in foreign languages
• marketing and website copywriting
• online reputation management – review analysis, summations and responses.

All of the industry implementations over the past 18 months are from the above categories. As a matter of priority, I would recommend independent hotels to contract, train and install chatbots on their websites to handle 24/7 hour customer service and guest communications.”

“At RevenYou, we use AI as the start and not the end. It is inspiration and a means to start the thinking. We use it to create lists of ideas and then we flesh those ideas out based on lived experience.

When using it, we always sense check what AI recommends. It is utilising American spelling while we are situated in Australia. Has it got the seasons right? Fall versus Autumn. Is it talking about Melbourne in Australia or Melbourne in the UK? Is it telling us 2 hours and 24 minutes drive or two and a half hours drive

We need to remember that we are humans talking to humans, and as humans we are getting bored with being fed the same content day after day and week after week.”

“AI chatbots are becoming a trend. However, most are broken and don’t fulfil the customer’s needs to the endpoint. For example, one might give you a list of FAQs if you ask for it, whereas the other may answer the exact question you may have AND help you fix the issue by actually doing it on its end.

I would suggest leveraging chatbots on your social media to interact with customers sooner by leveraging trigger words as comments that begin a conversation. I have a chatbot vendor that enables guests to interact on social media and another chatbot vendor that has worked with the UK government to automate 60% of all calls and is well-equipped to assist hoteliers automate bookings through high personalisation and customisation – from flights to hotel rooms in minutes. Feel free to reach out and I can connect you to these vendors.

Another way to leverage AI is data analytics. This has been around for a while, but data is king. Depending on the complexity, I believe you can leverage AI to understand your customer’s needs and then make better informed decisions. These decisions can be from which ad they are interacting with the most, to which cross-sell provides the most revenue in-house that can be part of the booking experience to increase day one average order value. If you have a data set, simply plug it into ChatGPT and ask it to analyse and provide you with insights. You may be surprised – this is the most basic way that anyone can leverage AI to make informed decisions.”

“I’m trying to always use them for inspiration, but NOT actual content to any great extent. We continue to rely on machines to do and say and automate and improve – when, in reality, the human aspect of bringing marketing to life can get lost. For data analysis, initial ideas on content, etc., using AI is fantastic. In the end, it needs to be thoroughly mixed and stirred with human input.”

“We’re already witnessing a backlash against the overuse of AI-generated content in marketing. Relying too heavily on AI can tarnish a brand’s reputation and undermine its authority.

In the sea of generic, commoditised content, we aim to stand out by using AI wisely and responsibly. Our goal is to make our content truly personalised, especially when it comes to video. Tools like Descript, Submagic, and OpusClip have revolutionised our video production. What used to take hours and a team of people can now be done in minutes, complete with stunning effects, captions, and audio enhancements.

These efficiencies have allowed us to increase the volume of both short and long-form video that helps keep our partners top of mind with their prospects.

To keep our written content unique and original, we harness AI to extract audio from interviews with our partners and podcasts. Then, we amplify its impact with AI-driven search optimisation, embedding the perfect keywords and technical elements.”