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The Boostly Podcast
AI, Data, and the Direct Booking Revolution – The 3 Phases of AI in Hospitality.
00:31:51
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- [00:00]
Mark Simpson
Welcome to the Boostly Podcast. The podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training, and most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. Today we're diving into a Spotlight episode where we shine the Boostly Spotlight onto a service or software that you need to know about as a host. And I'm joined by Luca Zambelo, he's the co founder and CEO of Journey, which is if you've not heard of it, it's an AI driven tech company that automates and personalizes 100% of the guest journey while simplifying the operations for people like you and me, people like real hosts. So welcome along. Luca, it's great to have you here.
- [00:39]
Luca Zambelo
Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
- [00:43]
Mark Simpson
So what is one thing you'd like people to remember from this episode?
- [00:48]
Luca Zambelo
Well, I think there's a lot of misconceptions around AI and especially even how will impact different industries and hospitality more specifically. And we'll love to dive deep into that and shine some light on some of what we think that this technology can do for our industry.
- [01:13]
Mark Simpson
Cool. I'm looking forward to diving in. And this is something which I think everybody needs to stick around for, which is when we talk about AI in general, there's so many nuances and misconceptions and that's what we're going to dive into today. Do that. Can you give us like an elevator pitch of what Journey is, just so people get an understanding of, of what it is and we'll go from there.
- [01:34]
Luca Zambelo
Yeah. So I mean, at its core we obviously build a pms because to build what we wanted to build, we need to build a pms. But ultimately we see Journey as an operating system and, and the ability to unify into single dashboards multiple different tools, like even if they're not run by us. But let's say your dynamic pricing tool, your guest verification system is all unified, even if it's done by other people, other companies, into a single system. So you have a unified experience as a user, but most importantly is all centralized so you can automate everything while using a. So it's like to call it like next gen property management system and that it's amplified by AI that allows you to automate a lot of the moving aspects that comes with hospitality.
- [02:27]
Mark Simpson
That's cool. And just a quick apology for anyone watching the visuals there. I've just made sure that you can see Luca as he's talking there. So we're going to dive more into the Journey and what it does later on in the show. But I want to talk broadly about AI and how it's transforming every area of every business, but especially hospitality was one big way that you've seen it changing how hosts manage their properties.
- [02:56]
Luca Zambelo
Well, I think the shift is just happening, so I think we haven't. We're yet to see the true potential. Some hosts are now start seeing more and more results. We have obviously some early adopters, but even us as a company, which we think we're definitely on the cutting edge when it comes to releasing features utilizing this technology. We haven't even scratched the surface for what even is about to come and what we have in the roadmap within the next six months, it's much more than what's out there, and it's already much more than what people even know that it exists. But obviously the number one thing that everybody's seeing is GAS communication. But there's so many different layers of automated GAS communications because again, AI is just as good as your data and prompt is a form of data, by the way, that you provide to your AI. And I think that's actually number one issue that exists in almost every industry is the lack of infrastructure and so lack of data. But yeah, so to answer your questions, automated guest communications, automated guest reviews, that's the number one tool that people are using today. But it's evolving to a lot more than that.
- [04:13]
Mark Simpson
It's cool and I'm excited to see what's to come because, I mean, I don't know of any other time, personally. I mean, I've only been in hospitality for six years, but even during that time, obviously PMSs were quite new and some of the automation tools, but actually now being able to see the AI being integrated into that is changing how I operate every day in my business. And hopefully for people listening to this, they can, they can get the step ahead for, you know, to, to put it into their business as well by, by listening to podcasts like this. So I understand that Journey Core is a pms and it automates the, the communication, the bookings and operations. You know, it, it does all of that. What features do you think have the biggest impact and why have you tried to tackle the AI side of things within the pms?
- [05:06]
Luca Zambelo
Yeah, so I, I do believe that I would like to clarify one misconception before we go without even into that. And it's like a lot of people, their experience of AI is just chatting with ChatGPT, giving a very simple prompt and getting like a very basic answer and, and a Challenge that I, that I say to anybody that, that, that is yet to see the potential in this technology is like to, to actually try to, to really get good at prompting and then sometimes even asking the AI itself. If you have a task that you want to accomplish, what kind of information do you need to accomplish your job at your best? And when you start really leveraging that and you start seeing the results of like what more data does for you and what kind of quality of results you are going to get, you, you'll be shocked. And this is really like, so that's what we focus on as a company in the past three years was to centralize as many information as possible and to be able to train these AI models to give the most accurate answers. Because in the end of the day, you're only going to use AI when it's accurate and it has to be better than humans. Obviously I kind of divided in three, three stages that there are going to be the most useful thing in the industry and what people are utilizing already today. One obviously is accuracy and guest communications, which is, which is very important, but it's more of a reactive way. That's kind of phase one, right? Then you have, in between that you have another phase which is, which is a product for example we just recently released, which is, it's called NIA Co Pilot, which is having the ability to have an AI model that communicates within different parts of your system and different AI agents they're working in your system. So you have one that specializes on answering obviously guest communication. One for reviews, one for pricing, one for app sales, one for your CRM. So you have one for SOPs, right? One for Frequently asked Questions. So you have different agents within the system and, and you want to make sure that your guests can access information, but you also want to make sure that you change the way you interact with your system with your software, where you can just simply ask a question. For example, hey, what's my average ADR for this weekend? What's my occupancy for this weekend? Hey, can you help me? Can you just lower pricing by 30% across the board? Can you make a calendar block? And you can just talk to your software and, and have it doing action for you. So we released already a version of that, which is called Copilot. So I call that phase two, Phase three, which is already a game changer, right? And phase three, it's what I think is even more exciting, which is the personalizations of the guest experience. So I think this is really where things are Going to start completely changing the industry forever is where you're not just reactive, you're not just like just having a more efficient operation, but you actually are going to create better guest experiences, fully customized guest experience, anticipate guest needs, make sure that you create brand loyalty with your own brand, which is something that for small operators was unthinkable up until now, even for the large operators in the short term, unless you're like a large hotel, it was really hard to build customer loyalty in a brand and, and that's going to completely change.
- [08:43]
Mark Simpson
It's exciting to even think about and I've never thought about it in the phases that you're talking about, but there's, I mean there's a big phase zero at the moment where so many people listening to this just will not use any AI in their business, which is, which is crazy. If you're one of them people listening to this, then there's so many reasons to just get on the AI bandwagon because I liken this to the early days of the Internet, you know, of those who are creating websites and doing all that stuff. We're a couple of years in now with AI or and a half years in with AI, aren't we? Since chat GPT launch. And I am definitely one of those people you've just described. I'm probably in that kind of phase one myself, maybe starting to dabble in, in phase two and things like that. But that kind of initially when people think of AI, I think you're absolutely right that misconception. People just think of it as like, well, it's just guest communication. I, I don't trust AI and therefore I want to do guest communication. And they may have dabbled, but even if somebody has dabbled six months ago, a year ago, they then it's changed already, hasn't it? And this is the exciting thing of how fast this is moving. So the sheer fact that you can do things that you mentioned there, where there's this copilot on Journey sounds amazing because I'm one of these people who I voice note. I like the fact that I can voice note something and turn ideas very quickly into actions and that's going to be such a time saver and that phase three which is where suggesting things that can improve guest Journey and I'm excited for that.
- [10:12]
Luca Zambelo
And it's going to change. We also change everything.
- [10:17]
Mark Simpson
I, I mean it's in every part of our lives as well, isn't it? But obviously at Boostly we, we really focus on direct booking. So A question I've got to ask you is, you know, the, the co founder is how does Journey in particular help our listeners with reducing their reliance on, on things like OTAs and how can it help them get direct bookings?
- [10:42]
Luca Zambelo
I think stage three segues perfectly into this question, actually, because once you are able to create brand loyalty, full customizations and full like personal touch for guests, and this is, this is one of the biggest misconception, right? Oh, well, AI is never going to be as good as humans at creating a personal experience. And yes, you're actually right, it's never going to be as good as humans. It's going to be much better than humans.
- [11:13]
Mark Simpson
I like that.
- [11:15]
Luca Zambelo
And so especially if you are, the reality is when do you have direct bookings? When you build the brand, whether it's even like a single home, but you created a brand around that home or you have a collection of properties. In the end of the day, once people, people wants to come back to you because of a specific experience you give them and they don't want to look elsewhere. Right. When you're just providing a place and you're just like everybody else, you have no loyalty. So people will just go back to an OTA and trying to shop around for best pricing or best reviews or a combination of both, or locations and so on. But when you create a brand loyalty and when you create unforgettable experiences, that's when people come back and it's so hard when you like. I mean, I used to be a former host myself. I managed up to 300 units. That's kind of why I started like building this company. And it was almost impossible to think about the guest experience because I was so busy with everything else. Right. And I think what's super exciting and fascinating about AI is that it's about to change completely. It's actually a big core believer of our companies like to really give your time back and, and your why back. Right. Why you started this and what you want to do in the first place and then you end up not being able to do it because you're busy with everything else. Yeah, I used to be able to be so busy managing my own software versus thinking about guest experiences, busy managing my own operations. And so like this is going to really change. One, it's going to streamline obviously your operations, but two, you're going to be able to automate this super personal touch and super personalized guest experience, which ultimately is going to lead to a lot more direct bookings, a lot more brand loyalty.
- [13:10]
Mark Simpson
There's two things I want to touch on that you've mentioned there, which first of all, you know AI will be better. I know there's a lot of people, including me, who go, I don't want it to replace me and a little bit like cringe when they think of it, but this is, I completely agree with you by the way, that ultimately can a person one to one be better? Well, yes, but you can't multiply yourself. Like you say in your case, 300 people hosting 300 guests at a time. And this is where can AI do it better and more consistently? And that's that consistently thing, which as humans we're fallible, right? And this is where we have a piece of tech. It will improve the chances that we are offering the right things at the right time and talking about our brand to encourage more people to come back and book direct. And that's what I'm really excited about especially as, I mean I look after at the moment 23 units and when it comes down to thinking of how would I manage my time if it was 230 units or like you, 300 units, well, I would really need to get good at having the right tools, the right systems in place. And I can already see as most listeners to this, hopefully use some automations where emails go out at set times and things like that. But ultimately with what you're saying here around AI, especially around the personalization of the journey, you can kind of have the message go out when it's most impactful instead of just a set time or when a guest has said or done something, that information can be pulled on by the AI to be able to be sent at that time. Is that. Am I right in thinking that I.
- [14:50]
Luca Zambelo
Give the perfect example? Yes, absolutely. And I give a perfect example. Like you can set up automated messages, for example, for guests to leave your reviews, right? What happened if that, that automated message gets sent to somebody who's actually had a negative guest experience with you? That's. That's not a good, that's not good, right? Same thing is like what happens. So obviously AI can absolutely prevent that, but that's at very basic. But then it gets way more advanced than that, right? In which it's basically impossible for you to gather information about every single guest and record in a CRM in a really organized way. It's basically possible for small creators, but even for large this happens and it happens in even big brands, hotels, this is not a problem just for short term rental across the board, although they're better at it. It's still hard for them to imagine a system where basically every single time a guest stay with you, every single interaction has been recorded, it's been stored, and then those information can be utilized for personalized services. For example, you know, you're going to remember the guest name, you're going to remember the family name, you're going to know what their birthday is. You're going to know, oh, they travel to, I don't know, like Florida with their kids during this time because it was like their daughter's birthday. Well, guess what you can remember, remind them three or four months earlier, like, hey, I know your, your daughter's birthday is coming up, so I wanted to give you like a, a discount for your next day if you're coming for here for your daughter's birthday. And like those, those type of, those type of experiences, they're impossible at scale, but even in small scales it's almost impossible to be on top of that. That's, that's just another example. But also I want to address one misconception that is happening that you touched upon, is that AI is going to substitute me. We need to start from the fact and all agree on the fact that AI is an answer. It's not going to substitute humans. In the end of the day, it's going to take whatever your vision is and make it bigger, better, and enable you to execute it faster. So it's going to really gift and be an amazing tool for creative people and for people that properly leverage this technology. AI is not going to substitute humans. It's going to substitute the humans that don't know how to leverage it. And that is going to happen much faster than people think. This is why it's important that we're not scared of this technology, where we actually embrace it and try to utilize it every day and see how we can get advantages from this technology in our day, day to day operation, in life.
- [17:48]
Mark Simpson
And would you say that's a myth about AI that you'd like to debunk is what we've just mentioned? Or is there other myths that you go, well actually people get a lot wrong about AI.
- [18:00]
Luca Zambelo
Well, I think there's literally, it's hard for people to sit in the middle. The truth is in the middle there's people that are like, well AI is not that good, cannot do much about it, you cannot do much with it. And I think that's a meat and it's wrong. I think AI is huge and it's going to change a lot of things. It's Going to revolutionize a lot of things. And then on the other end you have people that are absolutely terrified by this technology. They're going to be like it's replacing our jobs, like what are we going to be able to do? And stuff like that. And by the way, I saw this face with inside of my organization because we don't use AI only as within obviously our software as a service, but also inside it as a company. Right? Making things more efficient as a company. And definitely we got both phases. We had skepticism at first for majority of the company and then we got everybody being terrified. It's like, okay, we're all going to be jobs once they understood the power of this technology. And now finally we got to the, to the true phase which is like, okay, but this is. If everybody's going to use this technology, the only thing is going to happen is that we're going to 10x our output and so we're going to be able to do what we want to do in the first place much better, much faster. Because the reality is like if you think about it like nobody's doing what they want to do in the ultimate way. There's always room for improvements, huge room of improvements. And so all it's going to do is going to ultimately improve that. I'll give a practical example. Like content creation used to be done only by massive production company that cost like, you know, millions of dollars to produce even the smallest piece of content. Now you now you have, now you have content creators, influencers. They create content with, with an iPhone or a phone, right? Like there's just a camera. So content creation cost just went down drastically and all it meant is that now a lot more people could create content and so a lot more people could get a piece of the pie. That's really what's going to happen at a much even bigger scale almost across every single industry with AI.
- [20:11]
Mark Simpson
I can definitely see it and it's exciting. I mean what a great time to get involved in any business, but especially hospitality because it's something which can be, it can actually be on the tip of the spear of some of these new technologies and how people interact with a business which is super cool. But I guess one of the questions that I've got and that people listening to this is how can some of these automations enhanced rather than replace that personal guest experience? I know guests where I know what their favorite drink is and I know that. Am I still overly worried about this?
- [20:47]
Luca Zambelo
Yeah. No, I think as I said, ultimately is going to enable humans to do a lot more. Like it's going to substitute the repetitive task and the annoying work, but is ultimately going to enable you to do a lot more. Right. So I give a perfect example. So for let's say you have, you have a team that takes care of guest communication. So think about if you can remove them from the day to day guest communication of answering silly question, where is the coffee machine? How do you turn it on, how do you turn on the TV and so on. But you can actually have them dedicate their time to create custom experiences to give to the AI. So for example, what I give you the example before when somebody's coming back, can I create an sop? Or can I communicate with my AI? Like hey, can you come up with some clever ideas of things that I can offer when someone's anniversary is coming up? You could think about it. You could do that even in a conversation, in a chat with your software instead of having to click around a bunch of non intuitive UI UXs that exist in all management softwares today, which I very much dislike. Right? Like there's nothing worse when you get a software that you don't know how to use. And this is happening. The more comprehensive the softwares are, the more complex are to use. Think about it now you can have conversations with it, you can access any part of it by just having a conversation without knowing where the hidden button is or the hidden setting is and spending 30 minutes doing that and maybe not figure out in the first place. And you can have a conversation say how can I improve this in my operation? I can can improve this guest experiences. And so ultimately what's going to happen is that you're going to create creates a much better experience for your guest, much better revenue retentions and people coming back to your brand. But it's also ultimately going to happen is that the people that are going to do it faster, they're going to be a lot more successful than others. And also but simultaneously what's going to happen, the standards is going to go up, then expectations of guesses are going to be to have a much better guest experience because more and more hosts are going to be able to service that. That's why it's important to be on top of it as well.
- [23:11]
Mark Simpson
I completely agree with you. At the end of the day people need to be taking this advantage and getting this started as soon as possible. And that must be quite cool to be a co founder of a piece of software where so many hosts are going to be using it in different ways. To help their guests Journey and to do exactly what you've said where on that co pilot to be able to tell it to do different things. And this is where seeing these new changes and these time saving changes where actually then people can think more about their business as a whole as opposed to having to go, oh God, I need to remember this or this person's coming then or you know, all the stuff which hosts used to have to worry about before PMSS and especially before AI and the fact that Journey's got that in one is amazing. So what would you say to host to a listener to this and they're new to AI, what's the easiest way to really start to put some automation or some AI into their business.
- [24:13]
Luca Zambelo
Even before talking about specific hospitality? Honestly, this is something I told everybody in our company and sometimes even our tech team. I'm not a technical founder, but I've been since the day one of this technology. I've been experimenting even prior to ChatGPT. I've been a truly believer into this technology and how much is going to change everything. And one thing that I tried to change and I have changed was the culture within our company. But first I had to change my own culture and I started utilizing and this is something that I tell everybody, if your spouse, if your boyfriend, girlfriend are not jealous of your AI, you have an issue you're not using enough. I don't know if you experimented with ChatGPT voice mode. When you turn it on, you can also turn on the camera and stuff like that. And outside of Journey, I actually do even fun projects with it. Not someone who's ever built the PC. I literally built the gaming PC. Using AI has zero experience. I was sharing my whole, everything that I was doing and it helped me do it and it was like, and literally I plugged it in, turn it on and it worked. Which is not, not something that I would have expected, but it helped me to guide me through every single step. Like same thing. Sometimes I don't know, I don't know what to cook. I just like send a photo of or show the video of what ingredients I have in the refrigerator. Like let me come up with something easier. That's not going to take me time and it does. So why I'm saying this is because once you get used to it, to really the thing like you have to change your mindset and how you, you think about this technology, once you get used to it, to use it even in the small things, not eventually, even if it's completely unrelated to Hospitality, eventually you're going to translate on, how can I use this technology for my business? You have to first truly understand the power of it. And the more you use it, the more you're going to understand because again, the biggest misconceptions, when people first use it and they write the most basic prompt on ChatGPT and they get the same whatever results. But have you ever tried to give it a deep prompt with a lot of data, actually a lot of information? Like, have you tried to give like a bunch of documentation and says like, hey, help me make sense of this. Like we do that, we do that outside of like Journey, even for our own organization, even to help us plan what on, on our roadmap, on, on drafting out like new, new product releases. Have I thought of everything? We create our own GPTs for that. So you have, once you get used to that, then you're going to see how to, to implement in hospitality and to answer the more, you know, direct questions. In hospitality, obviously, you know, it's, it's to start experimenting with this technology also your operations with, with the few good softwares that are out there right now that they leverage this technology.
- [27:13]
Mark Simpson
It's very cool. And you're absolutely right, that mindset. The first thing people need to do is get in the mindset. That example I've not heard before, where you're giving it the ingredients you've got and it's kind of doing that for you. It is literally going to touch every part of our lives. And I mean, I use the voice mode and you can actually talk to ChatGPT, like as a person. And I have had that exact comment from my behalf which says, you spend more time talking to that thing than you do to me. And I'm like, no, genuinely, it is like having a. If somebody can bounce ideas of. I do think the caveat to this is you've got to be, you've got to be a very aware that it's not a person. It doesn't really think. It's just going off the prompt and it's got no. You know, I see posts on Reddit where people saying, hey, it's my therapist and it knows. And I was like, well, you just got to be aware that when you're telling it a prompt is responding with the information you've got. But that's what it's great at doing, isn't it? It's great at sorting out stuff which we just wouldn't be able to think about as quick as it can think about it. And that is really to. As long as you put in the correct prompt in and you put in the. The correct inputs, the amount that you can get out of it is just huge. And I think that that mindset thing is a great answer. I really do. So what I'd like to do, Luca, is throw the microphone out. I know we, on this Spotlight episode, we tend to keep these about a car Journey's length, but I know we haven't talked a whole lot about Journey itself. Where can people. If I throw up the. Open the microphone. Can you tell us a bit about Journey and where people can come and find more information if they're eager to get their PMS and their AI side of things combined? Where do they need to go? What do they need to know?
- [28:53]
Luca Zambelo
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, honestly, if you want to get in touch with us, Journey spelled J U R N y dot com. You know, we have a very active sales team that I'm sure if you send an inquiry, they'll be very excited to show you a demo of the product. But you can also be. I'm pretty busy, but I try to be as reachable as possible as well on my own. LinkedIn, Lucas Zambelo, if you want to search for me. And then obviously we have a Journey channel also on LinkedIn, very active, and Instagram as well. So those. Those are most active channels.
- [29:37]
Mark Simpson
That's cool. Well, Luca, thank you so much for. For sharing this. I know that I, for one, are gonna go check out Journey. I just enjoy these kind of conversations which are about AI and what the future is doing, and that ultimately, as hosts, what I'm taking away from this is having the mindset of actually going and testing it and using it, number one. Number two is to actually see where I can implement this in my business and to go and have the right tools. You know, go and check out Journey, go and have. And then to really see what this space is going to be. I mean, can you imagine the conversation we can have in 12 months from now, considering what's already changed? It's going to be amazing. And that's a great way to end. Is there any final thoughts or what do you think the future of this kind of industry is going to be like?
- [30:22]
Luca Zambelo
Yeah. I mean, my final thought is, honestly, don't miss out on this. Right. Like you said, what an exciting time to be alive. Don't. Don't be too skeptical and don't be. Don't be too worried about it. Actually trying to embrace it. The people. I know for many people, changes are hard but this, this is, this is a very exciting change. And if you embrace it, you're going to be very happy and very pleased and your life is honestly going to be better. For me, it has been. I've been able to execute a lot more things than I wanted to, but that I could, that I was even able to do before. So it's very exciting.
- [31:03]
Mark Simpson
Amen to that. I really like that. And thank you again, Luca, for coming on on the Boostly podcast. Thank you too for listening to this on the Boostly podcast. Do share this with other hosts and people who will get the value out of this and they can go and check out Journey. If you want to continue the conversation, you can go on Facebook. There's a free Facebook group called the Hospitality Community and you can come and join the group. You can talk about this podcast or any other hospitality questions in there. And to check out Journey and go and check out Luca, you can have a look at the the links in and around. However you're either listening or watching this media. Thanks for watching.
- [31:36]
Luca Zambelo
Thank you, Liam, for having me.
- [31:38]
Mark Simpson
No worries. Thanks, Luca. See you again. Bye for now. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee because it's.
- [31:46]
Luca Zambelo
So hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes.
- [31:49]
Mark Simpson
Don't write it, just do it loosely.