During more than two decades, the website has been the center of hotel online distribution. The user navigated, compared rooms and finally made their reservation. The website became a stable model upon which the hotel industry built its digital sales project with varying degrees of success.
NB: This is an article from mirai, one of our Expert Partners
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But this model is starting to change.
More and more travelers are asking questions instead of browsing pages. We want immediate answers. We have become impatient.
- “Do you have family rooms for this weekend?”
- “Price for tonight and one person with breakfast and late checkout?”
- “I want a room with a king bed and ocean views from June 15 to 18”
The curious thing is that conversation has always been the most natural way to interact. This is proven by the fact that many hotels continue to generate a very significant part of their sales by phone and email.
To cater to this “new” conversational user, our first instinct was the approach that seemed easiest and most intuitive: let’s adapt our successful web-based model. That was also the first thing we thought of at Mirai. Before long, however, what seemed logical and simple ceased to be so. What were previously advantages turned into problems and doubts. We paused and reflected: should we continue adapting, or start from scratch? We chose the latter.
The website will lose its prominence… but by how much, and when?
Since the website wasn’t designed to handle conversations, we users have learned to interact in a different way: by browsing pages, clicking links and filling out forms. And we have turned it into a habit.
But this is starting to change.
AI assistants, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, are able to understand natural language and hold conversations with users thanks to large language models (LLMs), something that, until recently, was only possible between people.
And if users can interact in real time by chatting – without having to make a phone call – the role of the website as an interface will be threatened, as it will face increasing competition from 100% conversational channels that operate outside a browser, such as WhatsApp and, above all, the rise of AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini themselves. The website will remain a very important direct channel, but it will no longer be the sole point of interaction with the hotel. How will these new “direct channels” be adopted? Only time will tell.
