Marriott Deploying Front Desk AI Tool To Assign Rooms, Elite Upgrades

Marriott will soon be automating the process of assigning guest rooms. While replacing human tasks with AI doesn’t always sound like a customer centric move, maybe this is actually good news?

Marriott is automating task of assigning rooms

Marriott Chief Technology Officer Naveen Manga participated in the Skift Data and AI Summit this past week, talking about the incremental progress that the company is making with AI. One comment stood out to me, in particular.

Marriott will shortly be deploying an AI tool that will automate the task of hotel room assignments for front desk staff. As described by Manga, “essentially, taking hours and hours of manual work — all that heads down work the associates do — and in a fraction of a second, 1.2 million rooms can be assigned.”

Hotels assigning rooms on a daily basis is a huge task, both given that it needs to be done daily, and also given the number of considerations that go into this. Front desk staff have to consider things like arrival times, room preferences, occupancy levels, elite status or other upgrade eligibility, etc.

When it comes to upgrades, it’s my understanding that Marriott currently has a system that secretly prioritizes guests for room upgrades, based on elite status and other factors. Then it’s up to the front desk agents to run down that list, upgrade guests, and assign rooms.

Is automation good or bad for hotel guests?

Generally speaking, when we hear of AI in the hotel industry, it’s not good news. The intent is typically for the hotel to cut costs and improve the bottom line, rather than improving the guest experience. However, on the surface, I feel like automating room assignments might actually have some upside, or at worst, be neutral.

After all, a computer can assign room types most fairly based on a variety of factors. Furthermore, for hotels that aren’t great about upgrading, maybe automating the assigning of rooms will actually increase the number of upgrades that are given out. That assumes that the AI tool doesn’t have a “hotel owner hates Bonvoy members” setting, that hotels can choose to toggle on.