Warwick Hotels and Resorts has a proven track record of over 40 years for delivering experienced personalized hospitality and outperforming results in hotel management, starting from its first hotel, the Warwick New York, acquired in 1980.
Following the New York flagship, the Warwick Paris near the Champs-Elysées opened its doors as the second hotel of our luxury collection; followed by the Warwick Fiji in the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. Other hotels in the US, Europe, and the South Pacific were established soon thereafter.
Today, the upscale Collection continues to grow around the world with a strong pipeline of new locations to be opened in North America; Middle East; Africa; Europe and Asia-Pacific.
We had the pleasure to talk with Alan Gonzalez, Group Director, Distribution & e-Commerce at Warwick Hotels and Resorts about his experience with Quicktext, the hospitality AI super app.
Can you tell us about your decision to select and deploy an AI virtual assistant in your group?
We took the leap one year ago after we benchmarked your solution against others, then we did a pilot with our property in Dallas… As of today our virtual assistant, we call her “Babs”, is deployed in all our hotels in North America and in Europe. COVID times were pivotal in the introduction of AI for hotels as our staff was reduced but we still needed to manage all our communication channels and booking platforms, AI has stepped in effectively for us…
Now it is part of our operation and available for all our other properties, in the middle east for instance, to benefit from it.
Does Quicktext meet your business needs?
Yes it really does, we also have a close collaboration with your customer success team to make sure that we keep on getting good results for all our properties. In some cases, we analyze conversations that were not optimal or did not yield bookings to learn from our clients and adapt accordingly. There is always room for improvement…
Do you get a good return on your investment?
Based on the aggregated dashboard for the group and keeping in mind that hotels were gradually onboarded in 2023, our AI virtual assistant generated over € 5 million worth of booking requests representing close to 22 000 overnight stays from over 26 300 client conversations.
So the tangibles are good and there is also a positive impact on our reputation when our clients get fast and accurate answers to their questions, although it’s harder to measure.
How do you see the future of hospitality and AI ?
AI will definitely have an impact on our industry. Hotel guests are starting to use AI not only for preparing their stay with us but also to do custom itineraries. The Warwick group is actually looking into this opportunity as all our hotels are located in top destinations of the world…
On a scale from 0 to 10 what is your Overall Satisfaction with Quicktext?
9, we still have room to grow.