Dive Brief:
- On Tuesday, Marriott International launched Ask Bonvoy, a new artificial intelligence-powered conversational search experience to help travelers discover Marriott hotels across the company’s global portfolio, which hit 10,000 properties last week.
- Ask Bonvoy interprets a travelers’ natural language search query, identifies their trip purpose and provides them with curated results from Marriott’s portfolio, according to a news release. The previously touted platform has launched in beta and will initially be available in U.S. English on Marriott’s website as well as its mobile apps for a subset of Marriott Bonvoy members.
- Ask Bonvoy is part of Marriott’s broader enterprisewide AI deployment strategy. With the launch, Marriott joins hotel competitors that have recently debuted their own conversational search tools.
Dive Insight:
The launch of Ask Bonvoy is “a powerful example of our continued investment in technology as we aim to make travel planning easier, more intuitive, and more personal,” Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano said in a Tuesday statement. He first teased the “robust natural language search experience” last month during an earnings call.
The AI-powered platform is designed to assist guests in exploring destinations and properties through more conversational prompts such as travel purpose, location attributes and desired amenities like dining, spa and golf options, per the release. Guests will still be able to search using traditional dates and location filters.
Once users have identified the hotel they’d like to book through the Ask Bonvoy platform, the experience will “seamlessly hand off to Marriott’s existing booking capabilities to complete reservations,” per the release. Eventually, the platform will support loyalty points-based searches.
“Ask Bonvoy is designed to meet travelers in a modern way at every point in their journey, whether they know exactly where and when they’d like to travel or are just beginning their trip discovery,” Drew Pinto, executive vice president and chief revenue and technology officer at Marriott, said in a statement. “Our measured launch allows us to learn directly from our customers on how they like to search so we can refine and adapt before we scale globally.”
Ask Bonvoy is powered by Marriott’s proprietary AI architecture, with responses “grounded exclusively in Marriott owned, verified property data rather than open web content,” the company said. During a virtual event last month, Marriott CIO Naveen Manga said there would be “guardrails built into the safety and security” of the conversations happening within this new search platform.
The launch comes amid Marriott’s multiyear technology transformation and AI integration efforts to drive value for guests, associates and owners.
Other hotel companies have made similar AI investments, including IHG Hotels & Resorts, which earlier this month launched an app in OpenAI’s ChatGPT aimed at helping travelers search, compare and explore its hotels. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts also debuted a native ChatGPT app designed to make hotel discovery and booking “more intuitive,” per the company. And Hilton rolled out a generative AI-powered digital concierge in March.
Meanwhile, Choice Hotels International is focused on the franchisee side of the business, launching several AI-powered tools last month to “help owners capture demand and operate more efficiently.”
