Just spent a busy weekend at a little inn close to Woodstock. It’s Sunday evening, all the guests have left, and the owner is finally sitting at the computer, surrounded by unanswered emails, an important review to address, and a newsletter scheduled to go out on Friday. After a weekend of putting out fires, paying bills, and smiling at guests, the emails still sit unanswered.
This struggle isn’t new for hospitality operators in the Hudson Valley and Catskills. From a small B& B or farm stay to a cafe or boutique hotel, staying connected with customers takes time. AI offers a solution, but the challenge is: how to use AI without losing that authentic local touch.
Making guest inquiries easier to manage
Answering inquiries and booking questions is one of AI’s easiest uses. You can have your owners ask your assistant to answer questions about available rooms and beds, check-in times, breakfast included and special requests.
For instance, you can include a note about a weekend visit in a casual email with directions and points of interest. Before your response goes out, there’s still a draft that needs your human touch. AI algorithms can sound overly confident, despite giving you wrong information, so you’ll want to confirm availability, pricing, cancellations and other commitments.
Responding to reviews with care
Customer feedback can shape a potential visitor’s perception of the hospitality business. Thanking someone for a good review shows gratitude; a balanced response to a negative review shows the proprietor values feedback.
Artificial intelligence may help reduce defensive language and find the right way to respond to a problem. AI still can’t come up with new explanations for why things happen or make promises the business cannot keep. Business owners should review the initial feedback, decide what’s accurate, and craft a sincere reply.
Creating templates for everyday messages
Many guest messages are formulaic. Arrival instructions, check-in/out notes, cancel messages, breakfast inquiries and special requests can be templated.
AI can be used to clarify and perhaps add a friendlier tone and simpler way to these messages. The host can copy these into a Word doc once approved and use them as a guide when talking to guests; this saves time on hectic summer weekends, fall foliage, and the holiday season without sounding robotic.
Helping international visitors feel welcome
The Hudson Valley and Catskills draw crowds of all language types. With AI translation, you can feel comfortable fielding international questions, translating lodging information, and making your suggestions accessible to all.
But when you’re working with food allergens, accessibility accommodations, safety directions, or essential policies, it’s best to have a human review. A minor translation mistake can cause a far bigger problem than an unprofessional sentence.
Bringing local character into marketing
Less time, more creativity with short seasonal menus and stories for your farm-to-table concept to live event marketing and newsletters, let AIl craft your ideas onto the page. If you’ve jotted down notes on local trails, community farms, fall leaves or winter weekends, it can fine-tune it into a promotional diamond.
For inspiration, owners can look at Chronogram’s guide to Hudson Valley farmers’ markets or read tales about the region’s seasonal tourism forecasts. Just don’t end up falling back into tired, cliche terms and focus on the things the company really has to offer.
Why guest privacy matters when using AI
If you’re planning on adding a guest email to your AI assistant, the owners need to know what’s in the email first. That email can contain the guest’s name in full, phone numbers, reservation info, dates of travel, payment info, access requirements and more.
Uploading text to an AI assistant means sending it to the provider’s servers for processing. For example, chats may be saved to chat history or used to train a model for certain services and settings. This training process is how a model learns from data, similar to how a person might learn from training data. Encryption encodes information to make it difficult to read.
Standard menu descriptions and event announcements are usually fair game. Private guest communications require a bit more discretion. Do not include any data that could be used to identify someone, and only include the information that is needed for the task. Never include payment information or sensitive personal data.
The Federal Trade Commission offers tips for business owners on ways to safeguard personal information that they must collect and store. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Privacy framework offers a voluntary, risk-based structure to help organizations identify and reduce privacy risks while improving personal information management. Owners can also review how their AI service handles personal information, use services that support no- or short-term data retention, delete conversations where possible, and implement staff policies.
Choosing privacy-conscious AI tools
Some of these AI helpers are built with privacy front and center. For instance, a ChatGPT alternative is being developed and hosted in Europe, with zero-access encrypted chat history, no chat logs, and no training on your conversations. Users should still review each provider’s privacy policy and settings before being given a tool, because privacy also depends on how it’s set up and used.
Keeping The Human Touch
AI must be the business’s voice, not a replacement. But owners can establish some simple writing guidelines: is the AI more conversational than corporate? More helpful than salesy? Personal without being nosy?
Record some sayings, local information and customs your business embodies. But above all, read and review any AI-generated response you send.
A Simple Checklist For Hospitality Owners
- Edit guest names and personal info before applying AI.
- Verify each and every booking detail and policy fact.
- Always use approved templates for common messages.
- Review translations on safety, allergies, and accessibility.
- Always read the AI’s response back to you before submitting.
Back at Woodstock, the innkeeper finally shuts the laptop after three warm, personal replies and finishing a newsletter that could have come from her own mouth. AI has removed the backlog, but the warm welcome they still remember was wholly human.
