Deep Dive: AI in Hospitality Now (Destination AI 2025 Recap with Drew Potter & Josiah Mackenzie)

Josiah: What you're about to hear is a deep dive into what is unfolding with AI in hospitality. Now it's a conversation with my colleague at Actabl, Drew Potter, who recently attended the Destination AI event in Washington DC, which attracted some of the top technology leaders in our industry. The reason I wanted to have Drew go through this with us here in this episode is he not only brings deep operational experience from the hotels that he's led throughout his career, but he's always tinkering at the frontier of AI himself and his work. I see it firsthand. He's always teaching me and the people that we work with. So as someone with industry expertise, someone who took detailed notes at this event and someone who's always testing new things himself, I think he's the ideal person to get into this with us. So without further ado, let's get into it.

[intro]

Josiah: Drew, I'm really excited to record with you today. I think it was week two at Actabl. We had the chance to meet in person. I remember being impressed by your depth of hospitality experience as a general manager leading different functional departments within hotels, and just the depth of knowledge you had about the hospitality business. What does it take to succeed as a leader, as a hospitality provider? And then now in your role at Actabl, you are helping our customers, hotel companies across the US think about how to use technology. But on top of that, one of the things I'm super excited to talk with you about is we were talking off air. I feel like you have this reputation at Actabl as being a tinkerer because you are, in addition to helping hotel companies, you're always looking at what are the frontiers of using a new technology or a new process. You have that curious mindset, so it's always a delight to talk with you. Appreciate you making the time. I want to get into this event that you attended recently. The Destination AI Summit took place earlier this week and I was not able to go and I had major FOMO. You were. So, honestly, I wanted to have you on the podcast to talk about that, what you saw and heard, and maybe this is jumping off point. Tell us a little bit about the event itself. How was it structured?

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. So it was an all day, single day event in Washington DC and it was structured in a way that really focused on knowledge sharing and just learning about what's happening in the AI world and the hospitality world and how those two are coming together. It was full of incredible panelists from almost every major brand, every major management company, and some of the leading innovators on the technology side. So it was chock full of great conversations all day and incredible opportunities to connect at certain points throughout, to just talk to the other attendees about, hey, I thought this was really cool. How are you guys doing this? Or what do you think about that? Is this something that we should be focusing on now or is this maybe lower on the priority list, and if so, what's taking precedence over that? And so it was an incredible event and I left with a ton of notes, ton of action items. And my head was just spinning. I was in a whirlwind where I was like, oh my goodness. This is awesome and to see how the conversations changed from last year to this year and to just think what's going to happen in 12 months for the next event. What types of conversations are going to be happening? And overall, it was an incredible experience. Can't wait to go next year.

Josiah: So I want to dig into this. You're such a prolific guy. I feel like you've already briefed our team in a few different places. You already have an article out on our blog, a link in the show notes, where people can read some of this you just mentioned though, what's different year over year. I'd actually like to use that as a starting point because I don't know about you, but some of the recent events I've attended, it feels like the AI sessions are some of the most attended. But then what I hear on stage is maybe stuff I could have heard two or three years ago. And so you said you noticed a year over year change, and again, you're always on the forefront of things. What stood out to you in terms of this year versus last year, you felt like it was new or different?

Drew: Yeah. So last year, listening to the panelists, the conversations were a little more theoretical in nature, where it was still trying to understand the best use cases and how can we start making this work. And the technology has matured a lot in the last 12 months. And with that, the conversations have matured a lot too, to where it's not as theoretical, it's more, we've built this, we've launched it, here are the results. Let's talk about how we can expand this and scale it across the industry and get these tools in the hands of all of the exec housekeepers, front office managers, front desk agents, GMs, regionals, everybody to allow for just greater bandwidth to focus on what really matters. And that's providing excellent guest experiences, meeting and exceeding guest expectations. That was another huge focus during the conference was how has the guest perception changed. And there were some incredible stats during multiple panels about the consumer's experience and expectations too. And how to match that and exceed that, but it was way more practical and I feel like in another 12 months, I don't even know how the conversations are going to go because these changes are just happening so rapidly. Fortunately, there are so many people who are just as interested in it as I am, but have way more technical knowledge than I do who are building these things, testing it, seeing what works, what doesn't, and then leaning into what's effective and actually moving the needle.

Josiah: Amazing. I want practicality to be sort of a theme of this conversation because you're somebody who has led hotels and hotel teams, 'cause you know what actually is going to move the needle in terms of performance. I want to take a little detour though from our conversation from this event and talk about a post you posted about a month ago where if you were stepping into be a department leader or a general manager using tech available today, even if your company has not purchased all this enterprise tech, there was a couple things that you were suggesting. Hey, everyone listening to this conversation on this show can do today. I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing some of those things. 'Cause just in the spirit of keeping it really, really practical, there's things you can do today. So what are some of those things?

Drew: Absolutely. So whenever I was on property leading teams, my biggest focus and biggest driver was always the guest experience. I always wanted to have conversations with as many guests as I could to find out, hey, how was your time with us? What did you enjoy? What could we do better next time? And just hearing that feedback and figuring out how to action on it. And I think if I were a new GM or department head starting at a new hotel day one, I would just download all of the guest comments, whether that's through TripAdvisor or Medallia or whatever platform that you're using to capture the guest's voice and just throw the last three months in, whatever AI agent or LLM you are most familiar with to help spot any trends because I think that's what AI right now is really good at is spotting trends and helping to organize data like that. And so first thing would be to understand, okay, what are our guests really saying? Where are the trends? Where are the themes? And then also utilizing that to find possible fixes for those gaps in the guest experience. That would be my day one, hour one. This is what I'm doing in my office after I've found where do I hang my bag.

Josiah: Right? And you could do this today. Anyone, any of our listeners could do this today. These tools are free or next to free. We don't need to overcomplicate it there. There's a win right there. And what's amazing about the hospitality industry is it feels like everybody's so focused on the guest experience. I spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of months listening to owners and investors, and even as they're thinking about driving performance, so thinking about how do we cut cost without getting into cutting into the guest experience. So it's interesting from how money and capital thinks about this to people on the front lines. It feels like that guest experience is a common thread, and so all of our listeners can take the action that you just gave and do it right now. Going back to the Destination AI Hospitality Summit, you said one of the things that stood out to you as around the changing guest expectations. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that, because we're in a rapidly changing world. It feels like the way that we interact with everything is going through a major evolution right now.

Drew: Absolutely. Yeah. The entire guest journey has shifted. People aren't going to Google to plan their trips as much. The phrase, oh, just Google it is starting to lose its meaning a little bit. I don't think it'll ever go away personally, but what was the statistic? 1200% increase year over year in guests journey starting with talking to their ChatGPT, their Gemini, their Claudes, to try and plan these vacations, these trips, these experiences. I've started to do it also on some of my recent trips to find good places to eat within a certain walkable radius around me. And that is the first phase. So this is really a consumer led shift in the market. And so what that means for us is the way that people are finding our hotels has changed. It's not so much brand story and creative photography and things like that. It's more how machine readable is my data and how can I make my booking engine ready for that kind of machine to machine handshake. And there were some incredible panelists who were offering some great insight on, to be honest things that were going over my head and this is how you generate these behind the scenes data formats. But for me that was an incredible takeaway. It's just the way people are finding out about us has shifted and okay, now we need to start shifting to match that. 'Cause if your data is not machine readable when your guests or your future guests are trying to find your hotel basically by searching these parameters through their AI companion here, if you're not populating on that, you are totally glanced over and losing market share quickly.

Josiah: It's such an important point. And it's interesting because Google has often been the front door of discovery for hotels. And of course OTAs have understood that and optimized for that. So, but this is sort of a major transformation that could changed the power dynamic in the hotel and travel business. And it's an opportunity, I think, for hoteliers to make sure that they're indexed in a way that is going to show up. And it's interesting 'cause I mean, as a marketing guide, I've dived into this quite a bit recently, and there's some of the things that allow you to rank well. In terms of you want mentions, so I think encouraging those positive reviews, reviews, plays such a big role, even more so now. So that's a big factor, but what you got to is just the technical elements of how these webpages are structured is really important to think about because my understanding is that the event, there was an example where there's a prominent hotel that did not have any visibility. And so you have these very large hospitality businesses just not yet ready for this world. That's going to play a big hit in the short term, I think on performance for them.

Drew: A hundred percent. One of the panelists had made mention of this, and I think it was from a question from the audience, does this mean that traditional SEO just doesn't matter anymore? And the answer was, it does still, you still have to focus on the foundations of brand exposure. It's just at the same time, rethinking your back of house foundations for how your hotel is visible online. One of the pieces of information that I found very enlightening because I had no idea about this as much as I tinker and learn about AI and how it works, is that a lot of the information that it pulls from is on Reddit. And so looking at specific sources where the AI is actually looking and building out brand presence there. And that really stood out to me as an aha moment where I was like, oh, I never even thought about the sources that it's going to to pull all this information from.

Josiah: Yeah. Interesting. Now I want to go back to just, I guess the overall tone of the conversation. You mentioned these year over year changes that you noticed. I think there was a stat where 61% of hoteliers were seeing AI impacting the industry now over the next year. That feels low to me. If I think about the opportunities, some of the things that you've described, and then it feels like a disconnect, how does that feel to you?

Drew: I felt the same. So that statistic was for hoteliers or industry executives who are looking at short term like now or in the next 12 months. I think that grew pretty exponentially for like 13 months and beyond, within like a four year radius. And I think that there is this mindset in the industry of we are slow to adapt because we want tradition to, there could be a bunch of different reasons. We're a very tradition heavy industry where we aren't really at the forefront of technological innovation, and that's okay, but I think that the mindset needs to shift a little bit to be like, that's wonderful. The human to human experience will never go away. That is what our industry is here to provide. It's just now thinking of, okay, how can I leverage what's available to enhance that human to human experience? What are those mundane admin tasks that I have my front desk agents do, or my frontline managers, or even my GMs or regionals do that I can automate to free up their time to spend more time on what matters, what's moving the needle, and that's building out these incredible curated, personalized guest experiences. So I did see that number as low compared to the vibe that I got at this event where it was now, now, now the future is here. But putting on my practical hotelier hat, I was like, yes, the future's here, but let's make it work for us and figure out the best use cases before we just change everything and spend a ton of money only to find out that it doesn't really work. And now we're back to square one. So I think there's some healthy hesitation around it, but I do feel like that number should be higher.

Josiah: I'd like to unpack this if we could Drew, because I guess I see AI as in these two areas. There's sort of efficiency AI of doing more, better, faster, cheaper. And then there's opportunity AI where we're able to unlock or create these novel experiences or things that we just technically could not do before. Right. But on the efficiency side of it, I think it's worth unpacking because, I mean, this event is a bit self-selecting because it is technology leaders. It's executives who have to think big picture. They have to look into the future. You're a really interesting person because you're in this environment, but you also know what it's like to be on the ground leading teams, and so you have this practicality and I feel like needing to bridge that is so important for driving change here, right, of saying what's actually going to work. Earlier you shared an example, if you are a new department lead or general manager of what you would do on the efficiency side. I'm curious if you've have seen anything either at that event or elsewhere recently in terms of driving efficiency, that was impressive to you and you said, hey, this is something that an organization could do now to become more efficient.

Drew: Yeah, there were a couple of examples for really good use cases for leveraging AI to increase efficiency, one of panels had just a series of brand technology leaders and executives. And what one of them was talking about is when they were looking at their business challenges and trying to identify what are two to three, four real challenges that need to be solved and then how can we make these new tools and platforms out there really bridge that gap and it was call centers. The call centers for these brands. And I was thinking even at the hotel level, taking these reservation calls at an independent property where you don't necessarily have the ability to transfer to some call center somewhere that's represented by your brand, and it was an incredible statistic that 30% of all calls to these call centers are billing related, and a vast majority of them are simply, I need to get a folio. I need to get a copy of my receipt. And creating a platform and launching a platform that totally automated that component for them, allowed their reps 30% more time to focus on the guests who are calling who were either genuinely upset and needed some additional care and time and resources, but also for the future guests who are trying to plan this incredible staycation for their spouse to celebrate a birthday anniversary. I want to really take care of my parents. It's their 40th anniversary, and they're just going down this whole rabbit hole of how can we make this as special as possible? And from the rep's side, there's pressure on that when the phones just keep ringing or if you're at the hotel level trying to take this call when the guest, they're still coming up to you at the desk and you are really stuck between a rock and a hard place because no matter what, somebody is going to have a subpar experience, freeing that time up for them, proved out a real tangible ROI for this use case, and I thought that was absolutely incredible and I think on the flip side of that, the phone trees kept coming up in conversation and how nobody really likes them, but they're this necessary evil. And the conversation shifted to, okay, now the technology is here. How do we get both our hoteliers and our guests to trust this? And so trust was really a key theme throughout this industry of these tools are great. How can I trust that they're not hallucinating? Or how can I trust that this data is actually right? Or especially how can I trust that this AI voice agent that's answering my calls to send out these receipts is handling each call in a way that I want them to, in the way that my guests expect without necessarily putting the guest off that I'm talking to a robot. And so that was one of the, I guess, philosophical questions that kept getting brought up during this conference was centered around trust and knowledge and quality assurance component to it that I thought was really fascinating.

Josiah: From what you just shared there, I think there's something that our listeners can be thinking about and that is starting with problems. I think the definition of the problem, I was listening to a strategist talk about this recently and it stood out to me as really important for effectively using technology, not just jumping on something to jump on the bandwagon because it's new and novel. I think you just outlined a great application of that. So starting with what I heard from you or from these panelists, I guess, was what is the business problem that we have, right? So you have all these calls distracting, then there's also the problem of trust, right? And then there's the problem of are we going to send the right thing to the right person, right? So I think continuing to stay with this, like, let's be clear on the problem. I feel like that also helps you drive change. Any sort of change management, any sort of innovation you have to get people bought on board. So step one, identify that problem. Make sure that you probably identify it as a team. Socialize, are we all on the same page here? This needs to be solved. And I imagine that helps deploy solutions. So I love that example. I wonder if we could pivot a little bit to talk about opportunity AI. Are there applications that you heard there that are novel that are just not possible without AI? I mean, I think the phone example is, but that feels a little bit more on the efficiency side. Are there, I guess, new elements of guest experience or operations you feel AI could unlock for hoteliers?

Drew: Absolutely. One of the things that I really took away from there was owning the entire guest's journey from planning to post stay, because even last year, six months ago, I would probably even venture to guess, the guest journey was really fragmented. They start planning their on these platforms, whether that's TikTok, Instagram, Google, or ChatGPT, and then understanding that decision process, the consumer's journey from A to B, to C to D, because traditionally you have from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, maybe some pre-stay contact and maybe some post stay contact, but primarily you were confined to these four walls, but some of the pieces of technology that were talked about that are still being built by some of these people that were attending this event were absolutely incredible for me to think about. And that having the information at your fingertips to confidently map your guest's journey allows you to have an unprecedented amount of insights to personalize the heck out of that guest experience, and that's really what people are looking for. Hyper-personalization is a trend, I think is just awesome and an expectation that guests are just going to continue to have, because once they've experienced that somewhere, they're going to expect that to happen everywhere. And if you know what is triggering this event for this guest to be at your hotel, you can use that and leverage it to really wow that guest for having an okay stay to just an incredible experience that, hey, I got to tell everybody about this. This was awesome. This is the only place we're going to stay when we're in this city, and I want to tell everybody about it because I want them to stay there too. That was something that I had not even really thought about because the technology just didn't exist to have these profiles for your guests that follow them and...

Josiah: Drew, can I just jump in there because I want to unpack this. This is what you're getting to is really fascinating because the, I mean, as a marketer it's almost easier for me to visualize personalization around digital touchpoints, whether it's the website or communication. I can wrap my head around that. But you have incredible operations experience and so you think about the profiles. I think what you're just getting into before I cut you off is the portable nature of the interactions. And is that sort of, because I've been talking to this bot for years now, it really understands a lot of depth of knowledge. Is there this opportunity to almost maybe in the future, bring a profile that they've developed with LLMs into a hotel experience. And then I guess my question for you is like an operations leader, how might you and your teams use that then? Would it come down to profiles and just richer understanding of the guests?

Drew: Absolutely. Yes. Yes. So one of the industry leaders that was at this event and was speaking on a panel is working with multiple different organizations to build out basically a universal profile for travelers that can jump from location to location, whether that's a hotel, whether that is a restaurant or a bar or whether that is through an airline or a tour group even, to follow that guest throughout each booking interaction. So all of their preferences, their likes, dislikes. I like additional towels in my guest room. I want my room to be at 67 degrees whenever I walk in and I want whatever music playing softly in the background, whatever that might look like for each individual guest just allows that knowledge share across the industry. And I was talking to this person for probably about half an hour after their panel, after the event ended to pick their brain on how this could work and selfishly, if I were on property, how would I leverage this data to my advantage?

Josiah: Do you think there's something there? Is this just a pie in the sky idea? Do you feel like this might actually happen? 'Cause I'm excited hearing you talk about it. Do you feel like we could see this?

Drew: I do. There are, especially in Europe, different governances that are preventing certain information from being shared, things like that. But this individual has worked diligently with those governance bodies to ensure that this is compliant in all of the constraints that it needs to be. And then on the US side building it so it just works as an industry standard, this is a standard model. And so building out the integrations for each of the different platforms, things like that. I was enthralled by a conversation with this guy. It was so cool to listen to him talk and just see it from his perspective too, because while he is in the hospitality industry, his primary focus is on a different section of it. But as we were talking, we were finding more and more overlaps between, okay, well this is how you see it being used for your side. This is how I see it being used for hotel guests and hotel management groups. So it was really exciting to just nerd out about this kind of stuff with them.

Josiah: It seems plausible because already I think if someone's been using an LLM, like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini for a while, it just has insane knowledge and history and it's always going to be bigger than any interaction I have with a hotel or a hotel company. Even if I am an extremely loyal guest because it knows all of my life and I'm bringing all of my life to my guest stay. And so if there's a way to ingest all that knowledge into a system so that hospitality providers could understand and customize the experience, it feels plausible. I think as we wrap here, I want to get into the practical things that people can do now because you mentioned integrations like for this amazing world that I would love to see happen. You talk about integrations being key, whether it's integrations or something else. What are some things that hospitality leaders can do today to, I guess build the infrastructure or just get ready for this world that is moving so quickly?

Drew: Absolutely, and that was one of my biggest takeaways from this event was what do I need to do today if I'm a hotelier to prepare myself for this new way to work. The key theme, there were two that I want to hit on with this question, but one is getting your data house in order. Everybody is so excited about these new flashy potentials for generative AI, but none of that really works without a clean, integrated data strategy. That's the biggest hurdle because all of these different platforms are creating their own AI component. Unfortunately, they don't communicate well with the other AI component that is in their other 4, 5, 6 platforms that they're utilizing. And so it is ensuring that your data is consolidated and it is ensuring that your data is clean. Because what the AI will do is build on what is already there. And if it's already built on a shaky foundation, you are going to see zero value in it. And so utilizing platforms that connect to your source systems and instead of having 15 systems of record, you have one source of action where everything flows into, and then layering AI on top of that component. And so you have the trust that the data is clean, it is accurate that the source systems that this data is being pulled from is right. That was step one in my book. By the end of the day, I was like, all right, if I'm doing two or three things, what's number one? And that's getting my data in order. Clean, organized, and staying on top of it. Number two was enhancing your team's AI literacy. There are a lot of people who are very hesitant to embrace different LLMs, different AI agents, things like that, because they don't necessarily know a lot about it. And it is very intimidating. If I have no knowledge walking into this chat bot or whatever, how can I trust that it's right? How can I trust that it works? And also how can I trust that this is actually going to solve a problem for me? And so what so many people with so many of the companies that were at this event were saying is feed the curiosity with your staff. Encourage them to explore these platforms. Encourage them to create use cases for how it can improve their day-to-day, and then allocating either specific amount of credits or training, budget, whatever to feed that, build up the AI literacy because that's where your ideas are going to come from. Whenever you're sitting at the executive level, you have maybe, I don't know, 30 layers between you and a front desk agent checking somebody in or answering the phone. And so it's just not your day to day, but for them it is. And so giving them the flexibility and the freedom and the resources to explore, learn, play around, would this work for me? Yes. Here's the business case that I'm creating to say, yeah, this is why we need to invest this many dollars into this because I saw X, Y, and Z from it. And then that also helps create this sense of ownership and pride and gets the buy-in. But between data accuracy and just cleaning that up and increasing your team's AI literacy and competency, those are the two things that you can do starting right now to prepare yourself for whatever is coming next.

Josiah: I love that. In the earlier conversation we had, Drew, we were talking a little bit about, I mean, to your first point about data, almost a prerequisite to that or a contributor to that is digitizing these different work streams, right? Because if it's all pen and paper, it's just not going to be in a format where you can collect data and learn. So I think at Actabl that's a lot of what we're focused on is, whether it's a digital night audit or guest communication, guest services, operations, different parts of the business, making sure that you're working in an environment that's collecting usable data is really, really important to us. I think before we go, I want to ask you one last question, Drew, and that is, what have you found most useful in learning about AI, to your point of raising literacy, you're at the forefront, you're always tinkering with stuff. Is there a podcast, something that you read? Is it just tinkering? What do you find most useful in learning about all this?

Drew: So I am naturally curious. That's my default mode. And so I am regularly in webinars for, I'm in a sales role now, so webinars that are focused for me and for my role that incorporate how others are using AI. And then I just find so much value in attending these things, or even if I can't attend, just having the recording on in the background at 1.5 x speed and listening to it as I'm doing other things, but pulling specific nuggets like, okay, well I don't think that whole thing would work, but I really liked this point because that for me is a piece of friction that already exists. Let me try that to see if I can get it to work and smooth that out for me. The other route is just asking the LLM itself, like, this is what I do. What are the best use cases to leverage you and your capabilities to improve my workflows? And just building on that and going as deep as possible. I have been surprised at the level of insights that I can get just from a simple prompt like. This is what I do. This is the industry that I'm in. How can you help me be better at what I'm doing right now? Or even just as a personal tinkerer, like, I want to do this with my house. How can I leverage you to do this as effectively and efficiently as possible? And then just going down that rabbit hole.

Josiah: It's amazing. It sounds so simple, but it's a rabbit hole is a good way to describe it. In preparation for our conversation, I was digging into some elements of this and I thought discovery might come up. So I was getting into the technical elements and it's been years since I've coded anything myself, but was getting into all these JavaScripts and site schemas that had to be created. And it was interesting 'cause I went to it, I was like, hey, I brought some notes. I was like, I've heard X, Y, and Z is true. I was like that right? Is this the best next steps that one should take? And it was like, nah, this part's right, this part's not true anymore. And it's just so interesting. These things you can just jump in, learn about anything, whether it's about your hotel or your house as you mentioned. So Drew, I really want to make sure that people are following you because you're always publishing stuff. I find really interesting. Is LinkedIn the best place to follow you in your work?

Drew: It is, yeah. Very active on LinkedIn. Excited to connect with anybody that has an interest in hospitality or AI and see how we can share knowledge with each other and move the industry forward.

Josiah: Amazing. Also include a link in the show notes too, an article that you wrote coming off of this event. I mean, we could have talked for hours, Drew, I think, 'cause you got into things that we didn't even get to in this conversation. So I'll link to that in the show notes. Encourage people to check that out at Actabl.com. Drew, I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for making the time to chat today.

Drew: Absolutely, Josiah. Thanks for having me.