How AI helps hotels to tackle OTA fees, food inflation, utility waste, and labour pressure – without cutting corners
When everything gets more expensive, efficiency becomes your advantage
In the current hospitality landscape cost pressures are coming from every direction.
- OTA commissions remain painfully high
- Food inflation is squeezing kitchen margins
- Energy bills are volatile and often unpredictable
- Labour costs are rising while experienced staff are harder to find
And in the middle of it all are hotel teams trying to deliver world-class service while managing shrinking resources. For most operators, that’s the reality. The response? Varies wildly. Some are hoping for things to stabilise. Others are taking control, leveraging AI to run leaner, smarter, and more profitably. Not with gimmicks or futuristic robots but with intelligent, practical tools that automate the repetitive, optimise the expensive, and relieve the overwhelmed.
This is the new playbook for hospitality. And it’s already underway.
CONVIO AI, works with hotels across all types and sizes to help them reclaim time, margin, and guest relationships. Here’s how.
AI Is Not About Replacing Staff. It’s About Replacing Waste
There’s a persistent myth that AI in hospitality means fewer jobs. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s harmful.
Hospitality isn’t a product-based industry. It’s a relationship industry. The people you hire are the brand experience. But too often, they’re tied up in tasks that machines can now do faster, cheaper, and without burning out.
That’s the promise of AI:
- Reduce unnecessary labour pressure
- Minimise operating costs
- Eliminate low-impact admin
- Reclaim control of bookings and communication
What follows are four areas every hotel can start controlling today and how AI makes it happen.
1. Cut OTA Dependency, Increase Direct Bookings
Every OTA booking comes at a cost, usually between 15–25% commission. Over the course of a year, that adds up to hundreds of thousands in lost margin for most hotels.
And yet, the same hotels often have websites generating solid traffic, traffic that bounces due to slow load times, unanswered questions, or booking friction.
AI fixes that. Instead of relying on third-party platforms to convert, AI helps hotels actively engage visitors while they’re still deciding: answering questions, building trust, and steering them toward booking direct.
Here’s how:
- Instant guest engagement: When a visitor lands on your website, AI starts a conversation. No delays. No missed opportunities.
- Real-time Q&A: “Is breakfast included?” “Can I bring my dog?” “Is there parking?” all answered instantly, with tone and detail that match your brand.
- Handling pre-arrival admin: Guests can request early check-in, late checkout, or note special occasions all through conversation, not calls or forms.
- Capturing the upsell moment: AI doesn’t just answer questions, it seizes chances to recommend higher-value options at the point of intent.
Hotels using CONVIO AI are seeing a measurable shift: fewer OTA bookings, more high-margin direct reservations, and happier guests who feel looked after from the very first click.
2. Tackle Food Inflation With Forecasting, Not Guesswork
You can’t control the price of tomatoes. But you can control how much you order, how you portion, and how you plan menus.
Food inflation has created real financial stress, especially for full-service hotels and resorts. Ingredient costs swing weekly. Menu staples suddenly eat into margins. And kitchens, pressured for speed, often over-prepare “just in case.”
This is where AI brings calm and clarity.
Here’s how:
- Predictive purchasing: AI forecasts demand based on bookings, historical usage, local events, and even weather. You prep what you need—nothing more, nothing less.
- Menu profitability analysis: AI spots underperforming dishes, identifies high-margin alternatives, and helps you streamline offerings without sacrificing guest satisfaction.
- Batch and yield optimisation: Smart planning reduces overproduction, ensures fresher meals, and lowers both prep labour and waste costs.
- Waste tracking insights: Instead of estimating, AI helps you measure what’s consistently thrown out—and why—so you can act.
The benefits go beyond cost: improved food quality, better sustainability, and a kitchen team working with clarity, not chaos.
And while CONVIO AI doesn’t manage your kitchen directly, it helps in subtle but powerful ways by surfacing trends in guest requests, meal preferences, and booking patterns that feed into smarter F&B planning.
3. Reduce Utility Waste Without Compromising Comfort
Energy is an invisible expense, until the bill arrives.
Heating, cooling, lighting, laundry, kitchens, pools, spa facilities… The modern hotel is an energy-intensive environment. And when left unmanaged, costs spiral.
The challenge? Most hotels only see energy as a “fixed cost,” not a performance metric. That’s changing, with the help of AI.
Here’s how AI brings down the bill:
- Usage pattern analysis: AI maps when, where, and how energy is being consumed—and where it’s being wasted.
- Occupancy-aware systems: Heating and cooling automatically adapt to whether rooms are booked or vacant.
- Maintenance alerts: AI detects equipment inefficiencies before they fail—like an underperforming walk-in fridge or HVAC drift.
- Guest room optimisation: AI can integrate with room control systems to adjust settings intelligently between stays.
Over time, these “invisible efficiencies” result in real savings—often in the tens of thousands annually for medium to large properties. If your utility bills seem out of control, AI helps you stop reacting and start managing.
4. Relieve Labour Pressure While Elevating Service
If there’s one challenge every GM or Ops Director agrees on, it’s this: staffing. Not just hiring, but training. Retaining. Replacing. Scaling. And most of all supporting staff who are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of low-value tasks on their plates.
You hired your front desk team for their people skills, problem-solving, and empathy. But instead, they’re answering: “What time is check-out?” “Is there WiFi?” “Can I get another towel?” …on repeat, 50 times a day.
This is where CONVIO AI delivers immediate relief. What CONVIO AI takes off your team’s plate:
- Guest FAQs across your website, social media, messaging apps, and even email
- Booking changes like arrival time adjustments or amenity add-ons
- Pre-stay communication that would otherwise be sent manually
- After-hours queries that would go unanswered or clog the morning rush
- Multi-lingual support, so your team doesn’t scramble to translate
The result? Guests get fast, accurate answers 24/7. Your staff focus on meaningful, human-facing interactions. And your brand delivers a consistent experience—without the fatigue. This isn’t automation for the sake of it. It’s strategic delegation.
Let AI handle what doesn’t need a person, so your people can do the work only they can do.
What AI Isn’t and Why That Matters
AI isn’t here to replace hospitality. It’s here to remove friction from hospitality. It doesn’t mean fewer staff. It means your best staff finally have space to breathe and to be excellent at what they do. It doesn’t mean impersonality. When done right, AI actually strengthens your brand’s tone, responsiveness, and professionalism. And it doesn’t require a complete tech overhaul. Most hotels start by applying AI in one or two pressure points—guest communication, for example—and scale as the ROI becomes clear.
With CONVIO AI, implementation is fast, tailored, and supportive. No disruption. Just results.
Hospitality vs. Tech: A Moment of Contrast
While the tech sector continues to report layoffs, restructures, and AI-induced redundancy, hospitality stands apart for good reason. This industry runs on presence, human interaction, emotion and nuance. But that doesn’t mean it’s immune to tech’s impact. It means hotels have a choice: Use AI to protect the heart of service while strengthening the business model Or ignore it and fall behind competitors who are moving faster and spending smarter
AI is already helping hotels survive inflation, high energy costs, and talent gaps. The question isn’t if you’ll need it. It’s whether you’ll be early enough to benefit fully.
The Cost of Doing Nothing
Let’s be clear: inaction is a decision. And it has a cost.
- That OTA booking you could have captured? That’s 20% gone.
- That unneeded case of avocados? Straight to waste.
- That energy spike last weekend? Nobody noticed.
- That staff member who just resigned? Burnt out from repetitive admin.
These are the everyday realities that quietly undermine performance. But here’s the flip side: each one is fixable.
What Forward-Thinking Hotels Are Doing Now
They’re not ripping up their playbooks. They’re fine-tuning their operations.
- Automating repetitive guest communication
- Increasing direct bookings with conversational engagement
- Reducing kitchen waste with better forecasting
- Lowering energy bills with smarter controls
- Giving staff time to focus on value—not volume
In other words: they’re controlling the controllables.
And CONVIO AI is right there with them, not just offering software, but providing real hospitality intelligence that lifts performance from Day 1.
Final Thought: Smarter Doesn’t Mean Colder
If you think AI takes the human out of hospitality, you’re using the wrong kind of AI. Done well, it makes your operation feel more human because your actual humans are finally free to shine. Hospitality will always be about service. That won’t change. But how that service is delivered, supported, and sustained? That’s evolving fast.
With AI, hotels aren’t choosing between efficiency and experience. They’re learning how to make one fuel the other. And that’s how the best stay profitable, no matter what the market throws their way.
