Hoteliers have been promised great things from AI. The potential to automate the most time-intensive aspects of hotel operations, revenue management, and marketing. Seamless guest communications that happen without staff having to lift a finger. And ultimately, opportunities to drive growth and profitability thanks to next-level business intelligence.
NB: This is an article from Cendyn
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Exactly when AI will make a deep and profound difference to hotels still feels uncertain.
During the year ahead, Model Context Protocol (MCP) has the potential to transform hotel bookings and unlock new opportunities to Find, Book and Grow audiences. Here’s why.
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a way to let AI tools safely connect to a hotel’s systems and information. It’s a layer that sits between AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and where essential hotel data is stored, such as the hotel PMS, booking engine, and other systems.
When built onto hotel systems, MCP enables AI tools to give real, accurate answers to people, rather than generic answers. It can include information such as policies, amenities, and available services. A hotel can choose what data to make available to AI tools via MCP, so this can also include live availability and rates.
Leveling up hotel visibility in AI tools
The ability to display live information about rates and availability in AI results is a key aspect of this new dawn of AI using MCP. It means results in AI tools progress from being generic and sometimes inaccurate, to using accurate, real, live information. And this is the kind of information that turns casual browsers into bookers.
Before now, most of this information has been surfaced to AI tools from OTAs. By taking advantage of MCP solutions, more hotels can be seen at the exact moment travelers are making decisions. Complementing existing hotel digital strategies by reclaiming visibility on emerging channels, essential hotel information can now be made available to AI tools seamlessly.
Not only will MCP bring hotels greater visibility on AI tools, it primes them for the next phase of AI rollout: agentic AI. When technology reaches the point that AI tools go a step further and complete actions on behalf of users, such as booking a hotel room, hotels that have adopted an MCP solution will be ready to benefit from these bookings.
