The news. PhocusWire reports that hotels are starting to worry about re-shopping by personal AI assistants: book a room, keep watching the price, then cancel and rebook if something cheaper appears. "There are a lot of landmines in the process that we're not ready for yet," says Rick Posey, VP of AI and product at Cendyn.
Posey's concern is the hotel's own numbers. An assistant told to keep hunting inflates the look-to-book ratio, and bookings it may later cancel make pace "look stronger than it actually is."
The evidence is thin so far, and the piece says so. Hotel executives put traffic from AI search at around 1% of nights. One revenue specialist talks of "low, low percentages." And cost may limit it: "A service that checks prices every day is not cheap," says Jordi Serra of 123Compare.me.
This already happens, by hand
Re-shopping is not new to anyone who has worked a desk. Clients have always asked whether a price dropped after they paid. What changes is who does the asking, and how often.
In our booking data, 25.3% of decided bookings were cancelled, on a base of more than 34,500 confirmed and cancelled rows. That is humans, using free cancellation as it was written. A cancelled booking was never a button. Somebody reopened the file, read the policy and dealt with the money, and only then did the new booking begin.
Now picture the same terms read by software that never gets bored of checking. The piece says re-shopping is made possible mostly by free cancellation policies. It also reports that 58% of travellers in a new Phocuswright study would pay more for a booking that comes with free cancellation. So hotels cannot simply take the policy away.
What an agency should check
Three plain questions come out of this, before any assistant is in the picture.
Do you know, for every live booking, the last date it can be cancelled free? Who pays when a rate is cancelled and rebooked: is your margin safe on the second booking? And when a client's assistant, not the client, sends a request to change a booking, whose word do you act on?
None of these needs new software to answer. They need a file that is complete.
If a client's AI assistant cancelled a booking tonight, how would your desk find out?
Source: PhocusWire — Personal AI assistants could be re-shopping 'landmine' for hotels.