How generative AI elevates the luxury hospitality experience

In the world of luxury hospitality, guests expect more than just impeccably designed properties, world-class dining and well-appointed rooms. These are table stakes. To deliver on the promise of a luxury stay, brands must deliver bespoke, high-touch experiences that make every guest feel uniquely valued, from their first interaction with the brand to long after they depart.

As luxury brands scale globally, maintaining this level of personalization across an expanding portfolio presents significant challenges. Delivering consistent, high-touch service throughout the entire guest journey—across research, booking and post-stay phases—becomes increasingly complex, especially with rapid growth, high staff turnover and evolving customer preferences.

Enter generative AI. While AI has already made significant strides in the broader travel and hospitality industries, the nuanced demands of luxury hospitality make it an especially promising area for innovation. Generative AI is not just about efficiency—it’s transforming how luxury brands deliver exceptional, personalized service at scale. Though AI won’t replace a well-trained on-property team that can anticipate guests’ needs and deliver accordingly, it offers valuable use cases that enhance these teams’ ability to perform even better. Drawing from our work with leading luxury brands, we’ve identified three applications of generative AI that address the challenge of delivering personalized experiences at scale. These use cases showcase how AI is enabling luxury brands to consistently deliver bespoke experiences across their entire global portfolio.

Luxury hospitality is experiencing an unprecedented boom, with both legacy and emerging brands scaling their portfolios to meet rising demand. However, as these brands expand, one of their greatest challenges is maintaining the balance between standardizing high-touch, personalized services and allowing for bespoke localization at individual properties.

Our collaboration with a prestigious legacy luxury brand with a global footprint illustrates how gen AI could effectively address this issue. The client sought a solution to maintain service consistency across more than 40 properties while still allowing each location to reflect its unique regional culture and style. ZS has proposed a generative AI approach designed to standardize operating procedures while enabling local adaptations. This solution would ensure that each property maintains a distinct personality within the framework of the brand’s global service standards.

Beyond enhancing the guest experience, this solution is also intended to create efficiencies for employees by streamlining training and onboarding processes. The concept is to enable new staff to quickly align with the brand’s expectations while empowering existing employees to share best practices and feedback across the portfolio.

In another case, a fast-growing global luxury brand was struggling to manage a surge in inbound email reservation requests, leading to delayed responses and a dip in service quality. ZS implemented an intelligent automation solution that analyzed and responded to emails automatically. This system read incoming requests, identified specific needs and queried internal platforms—such as the property management system, customer data platform and rate systems—to craft personalized, perfectly worded responses. With 85% of emails now receiving an automatically generated reply, the firm saw significant improvements in both response time and accuracy, driving an additional $1 million in projected annual revenue by reducing missed or inaccurate reservations.

One of the most transformative uses of generative AI in luxury hospitality is its ability to unlock the hidden value in vast amounts of unstructured, customer-generated data—insights that were previously out of reach. Through ZS Atlas Intelligence, our proprietary generative AI solution, we help brands analyze massive datasets such as online reviews, itemized meal tickets linked to guest profiles and other unstructured customer interaction data. By synthesizing this data in real time, luxury brands can uncover actionable insights that inform critical decisions around services, amenities and partnerships based on what their guests truly value.

In 2023, ZS partnered with the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International to analyze more than 1 million online reviews using Atlas Intelligence. The report revealed a notable post-pandemic shift in customer perceptions of brands across chain scales. Despite record-high average daily rates (ADR), luxury hotels were seen as delivering the best value for money—a stark contrast to pre-pandemic sentiments. This insight-empowered luxury hoteliers to confidently pursue ADR-focused pricing strategies, knowing they were in sync with evolving customer expectations.

By tapping into the deep well of unstructured customer data, brands are no longer working with limited information. Generative AI provides the clarity and confidence luxury hotels need to stay ahead of trends and make data-driven investments that align with guest preferences.

Generative AI is transforming how luxury hospitality brands engage with their customers by enabling the creation of personalized marketing content and tailored offers. With generative AI, brands can deliver highly relevant, customized experiences at scale—more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. Beyond simply refining the tone and imagery of communications, AI can optimize product offerings to increase conversion rates, maximize upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and ultimately enhance the customer experience, driving up metrics like Net Promoter Score.

Traditionally, content development has been a bottleneck for brands, often requiring significant investment and reliance on external agencies. Generative AI changes this by enabling brands to create personalized content quickly that is aligned with their style guidelines and customer preferences, without the typical cost and time constraints.

For one of our hospitality clients, generative AI was used to create and optimize email subject lines for millions of customers. The AI-powered solution tailored subject lines based on individual customer profiles, adjusting variables like length, sentiment and complexity to maximize engagement. The results were impressive—a 6% increase in email open rates and a 20% lift in click-through rates compared to the traditional approach. With over 8 million emails sent weekly using these AI-driven enhancements, the impact of intelligent content generation at scale became clear, highlighting the power of generative AI to drive meaningful customer engagement.

Generative AI is already driving innovation across the hospitality industry, but its potential in the rapidly growing luxury segment is especially promising. By addressing key challenges—such as balancing standardized service with local customization, unlocking insights from unstructured data and enhancing customer engagement with personalized content—generative AI empowers luxury brands to deliver exceptional, bespoke experiences at scale.

While many companies are experimenting with generative AI in proofs of concept, few have managed to scale these innovations effectively. Achieving this requires cutting-edge AI solutions, a robust data infrastructure and advanced platform capabilities. At ZS, we are at the forefront of this transformation, helping clients implement enterprise-grade gen AI solutions that are designed for scalability and long-term impact.

The potential of gen AI to reshape luxury hospitality is immense. By strategically embracing this technology, luxury brands can elevate guest experiences, deepen customer loyalty and secure their positions as industry leaders.