Choice Hotels International is in the midst of an enterprise-wide artificial intelligence deployment.
In April, Choice partnered with AWS on an AI integration that is set to reshape how guests discover and book hotels, how franchisees manage operations and how the company optimizes its distribution and channel ecosystem. A few weeks later, Choice rolled out a slate of AI-powered tools focused on the owner side of the business.
Earlier this month, the hotel company tapped Tony Pallas as chief technology officer to help drive its next phase of technology innovation. Pallas will report directly to Anna Scozzafava, Choice’s chief data, AI and technology officer.
In a one-on-one interview with Hotel Dive, Scozzafava gave an inside look at Choice’s next phase of digital innovation and provided insight on how the company works to ensure it meets both guests’ and owners’ evolving technology needs. She also shared how AI will reshape many aspects of hospitality, including how the technology could amplify the humanity that’s foundational to the industry.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
HOTEL DIVE: What does Choice Hotels’ next phase of technology innovation look like?
ANNA SCOZZAFAVA: If I take a step back and think about where we started, we’ve been on an AI journey for a couple of years, and we really took an inside-out philosophy as we thought about AI. So we wanted to lean in with our associates first and focus on making sure that we understood our own internal workflows and making sure we had the right platform in place. Harmonizing across AWS and AgentCore is going to give us a pretty good advantage in being able to deploy at scale, speed and safety.
We are asking ourselves how can we make sure that we’re putting the right tools into our franchisees’ hands, while also trying to reimagine how we can do that so it’s simple for them. We want to make sure that our franchisees aren’t having to learn something new. AI should feel very natural to them.
When it comes to the guest side, we’re making sure that we are working with the right platforms and the right partners. There is a travel discoverability and booking transformation well underway, so our vision is starting to come together on the franchisee side as we navigate through changes that are happening in the distribution landscape on the guest side.
How does Choice ensure AI integration is smooth for owners, so that it can be a benefit rather than a barrier?
Behind the scenes, our technology can be really complex. As we approach any tool that will go out to a franchisee, or at the property level, we evaluate the user experience, which has to be one of simplicity. We have been working with our owners as we’ve been innovating, prototyping and developing these tools to make sure that they are just easy and intuitive. If you make it too complex, you’re not going to get the adoption, and owners are not going to see the value, which is obviously what we’re after.
When it comes to AI integration, what investments is Choice prioritizing to ensure the best value for the cost?
We’re making sure that we have the foundation in place, because that's really critical for us to make sure we can take a truly pragmatic lens as we think about where the ROI is going to be for our owners and how it’s going to show up in their day to day. So, if a tool is not increasing their conversion rates or it’s not making better pricing decisions for them — metrics that they’re already used to — then I don’t think we’re doing it. We’ve been very deliberate in making sure that we’re tackling true franchisee needs and placing our investment where our franchises are telling us it matters.
Several Choice competitors have launched AI-powered hotel search tools in recent months, but Choice doesn’t have its own consumer-facing product. Is this something Choice is working on?
We are certainly innovating in the background. My direction to the team has been that we don’t need to be first, but we need to get it right. There’s so many moving parts that are happening right now in that landscape that we want to make sure we’re focusing on some of the fundamentals too. Just making sure that our hotels are showing up in AI search is really important. The content and the data structure underneath are actually critical to having that happen. And as it relates to showing up in search, we’re making sure that our data is not fragmented, but that it’s cohesive and coherent because that matters in this evolving LLM world.
But yes, we are working on the guest side, partnering with all the major platforms and testing and learning, because we do believe that is the next place we need to go.
One topic discussed at this year’s NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum was AI’s potential to reshape or disrupt hotel workforces. How do you foresee AI impacting Choice’s organization?
I think about AI as an amplifier of humanity, not a replacement for it. Our investments in AI are really designed to support people, not replace them. We should be making hotel operations and our own corporate operations much more efficient with AI, but we should also be making sure that we’re harnessing the power of the people that we have, because that creativity and that humanity still remains fundamental to the hospitality industry.
