The numbers have been in for a while now. Numbers agreed on by the authoritative key organizations WTO, ILO, OECD, Eurostat, UNWTO: today, globally, one in ten jobs is in tourism, travel and hospitality, with accommodation and food services accounting for up to 6% of global employment. How can this sector attractiveness be explained? Broadly speaking, absolutely any combination of talent, skill & personality is needed and welcome in the dynamic and international environment of hospitality at large, in which growth opportunities are a given.
The combination of humanistic and intellectual dimensions, unique in the tertiary sector, is regarded by hospitality professionals as exhilarating and highly fulfilling. Key metrics measured throughout the Value Chain evidence a high performance level within a complex environment and infer each employee’s direct contribution to business success.
How AI is reshaping the hospitality industry
The Fourth Industrial Revolution 4IR has added high tech components to the people-centred paradigm. Early adoption of AI, specifically with Hospitality 4.0 as of 2010, has moved technology from experimentation to mainstream use, where innovations drive shareholder value in multiple ways.
In an increasingly dynamic environment, two main issues have historically been an issue; uncertainty of demand and cost structure of operations. With AI, optimizing revenue growth and cost reduction is enabled by complementing rules-based decision making with the contextual probabilistic “predictive intuition” approach offered by Machine Learning. This makes the sector highly interesting for REITs, institutional investment vehicles.
The enduring strength of Swiss hospitality education
Those with a solid Swiss hospitality education are familiar with both approaches. The Swiss hospitality ethos entails that the hotelier “knows the rules before breaking the rules”. Theory plus Praxis equals Swiss made Hotelier; in this formula lays the unique strength of the traditional Swiss hospitality education model. That means a Swiss made hotelier has experienced the nature of all primary operations jobs in the complex hospitality system and has studied the underlying theory with a multi-disciplinary approach. This ensures that Swiss made hoteliers are true masters of their craft, unafraid of uncertainty, competent and confident to take strategic decisions, known for their unwavering integrity.
It was César Ritz, the Swiss-born hotelier who established the rules of luxury hospitality in the late 19th century with the opening of his Ritz Paris. Regarded as a leading strategist in hospitality venture, Ritz not only established the rules governing quality processes, on which formal hospitality education were henceforth based but ensured that staff were given a span of autonomy to make value creating decisions contextually. The Ritz quality mantra was “see all without looking, hear all without listening, be attentive with confidence”.
At SHMS, one of Switzerland’s premiere Hospitality Education Institutions, the integration of AI related content into the curriculum takes the same approach. Along the rule-based ethos, introductory AI education begins with governance, the rule-based structural foundation, the code of conduct on ethics, privacy, accountability, and responsible use of AI. In preparation for the context of the future workplace, students are then systematically familiarized with industry use cases and introduced to the clearly defined levels of AI utilisation which students are then required to apply in a transparent manner to the work they submit for grading.
Typically, assignments can therefore contain requirements to share prompts engineered for the purpose of research and brainstorming. At a higher thinking level, evidence of prompt engineering is required to reflect a dialogue of reasoning with the AI agent. And a third level requires prompting for full AI agent autonomy deployed in project proposal, for image generation, space design, budgeting, or training content.
Balancing automation with human connection
In the complex hospitality system, value is co-created with the customer at the line of interaction front-stage, out of sight of the customer in the back-stage and in interactions with the system’s support functions. Through theory and praxis, the mechanisms of responding to customer’s wants, expectations, needs and most of all unmet needs are acquired, in a hybrid of rules-based and contextually, which is considered an important factor for a brand’s differentiation strategy.
When SHMS alumni enter the workplace, they bring hospitality business big picture understanding, which is indispensable when evaluating when and how AI makes sense in hospitality services.
Automation of the check-in makes sense in order to respond to the expectation of no-to-low wait time at the front desk. Probabilistic Chatbots makes sense to satisfy guests’ expectation of instant responsiveness. A human concierge makes sense when a bespoke experience is the guests’ preference. IoT-enabled smart rooms systems make sense to meet guests’ need for personalization and customization and respond to UN-goals relevant to sustainable “planet” and “profit”. Butler Service makes sense for the contextual experience only a gifted human can provide. Neuroscience techniques like eye-tracking, facial coding and EEG attention and memory measuring reveal preferences and therefore make sense when rethinking the redesign of marketing content.
AI as an enabler of the hospitality experience
AI workforce planning makes sense to optimise employee availability, boost motivation and reduce cost of absenteeism. When repetitive and routine tasks of the backstage are delegated to automation, AI frees up capacity. This allows front-line staff to step fully into the frontstage, reclaiming the high-touch, emotional engagement for which a hospitality profession was chosen in the first place, where human connection make those magic unforgettable moments, driving customer delight and employee job satisfaction.
What the Swiss made hotelier is trained to truly master is this strategic engineering and orchestrating of causal mechanisms for sustained strategic success, using both rules based and experienced based approaches, deploying AI where it makes sense, unafraid of uncertainty, with competence and confidence.
