HRS has implemented an AI-driven "brain" into its Lodging as a Service platform, which the company said can ease management of increasingly complex lodging programs.
The platform's Core enhancements—an acronym for Continuous Optimization and Recommendation Engine—can "ingest" and "enhance" data both within HRS and transactional data—booking, payment and carbon emissions data, for example—from such external sources as travel management companies, HRS VP of data science and strategy Henning Schmidt said. For example, externally provided hotel data might not include relevant sustainability information, so the engine can enhance the data with the information, he said.
"We enrich information as it comes in, so once it's in Core, it's all brought up to the same level of quality, and we can run an analysis on all data," Schmidt said.
That analysis enables the engine to analyze potential problems within a hotel program as well as suggest actions that can resolve the issues, according to HRS. For example, the platform can propose dynamic rate caps in response to increasing average daily rates in a key destination, letting a program be responsive to a market rather than relying on a static rate cap.
"It can highlight things that likely will go wrong or have gone wrong," Schmidt said. "Why did [average daily rate] go up, or what made satisfaction go down, and what are the drivers? Was it my company only or an industry-wide thing? You have benchmarks to understand, transparency to know why it is and what you can do to prevent it from happening or fix it."
Modules within Core include a performance overview of traditional metrics, sustainability analysis, duty of care, savings, traveler satisfaction, traveler compliance, future market analysis and potential solutions through HRS and service-level agreements, according to HRS. System access also is customizable, so if one person at the company bears responsibility for sustainability, they can be approved to access that data but not data in other categories, Schmidt said.
The engine is available at no extra cost to clients using the platform, and some large global clients already have been using it, according to HRS. Two major areas they have been most frequently using it have been around analyzing recent rapid increases in ADR in recent months as well as in understanding carbon reduction projections and the actions that will be needed to be carbon-neutral by 2030, according to Schmidt.
The aim of the engine is to ease the increasing complexities travel managers face not only in fragmentation of the workforce and in travel programs but also travel managers' larger slate of responsibilities, he said.
"Getting into real insights—what's the level of convergence you can expect, how much leakage do I have and how can I optimize that—that is almost impossible to already grasp," he said. "If you pair that up with all these different objectives—increasing traveler satisfaction while maintaining savings and caring about the planet with sustainability—all of that on a non-consolidated data set is almost an impossible mission."