«I'm heading to Madrid tomorrow, find me a hotel near my meeting with a gym and room service»: natural language booking is beginning to establish itself in the hotel world. Not only on the side of major groups which have announced partnerships with ChatGPT and others in turn while evolving their distribution channels, but also from a corporate booking specialist, HCorpo.
This key market player has indeed just presented three innovations, all revolving around artificial intelligence. Starting with conversational booking. From now on, business travellers will be able to access Hcorpo's services directly from their company's AI environment, with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and others thus becoming full-fledged booking interfaces. In this context, the AI will query the entire Hcorpo ecosystem to suggest the most relevant establishments, without the user having to leave their usual tool. And this, while respecting travel policies and price caps, negotiated agreements or traveller preferences, whilst fitting into the appropriate approval workflows.
" Artificial intelligence is becoming a new interface between employees and corporate systems, estimates Salomé Mogier, Chief Commercial Officer of Hcorpo. Business travel will naturally follow this evolution ». Just like the travel management sphere. Indeed, another innovation unveiled by Hcorpo relates more directly to buyers and travel managers by tackling a classic pain point: data exploitation.
Querying your expenditure data in natural language
Hcorpo now offers them the option to ask questions using natural language, for example, «What will my total expenditure in Paris be in 2026?», «Which hotels should I include in my next RFP?» or «What would be the impact of shifting 50 % of bookings from 4-star to 3-star hotels?». In return, drawing on millions of data points that are often under-utilised, travel managers will have access to analyses, simulations and directly actionable recommendations. Or, in other words, how to move from data reporting to decision-making.
Finally, the last building block that Hcorpo has tackled: another well-known headache for finance departments, namely the multiplicity of invoicing regimes, tax rules and payment methods depending on the countries and entities of a group. Until now, these constraints have required specific configurations and often manual trade-offs. Now make way for artificial intelligence.
Through the H-SmartPay solution, AI analyses in real time the context of each booking—whether it is the country, the entity, the financial policy or the VAT recovery objectives. This is in order to automatically determine the most suitable financial model, be it a Merchant Model, a VAT recovery mechanism or a standard regime. A « paradigm shift » for the Finance and Procurement teams, explains Hcorpo: « For the first time, a single platform is capable of integrating multiple financial logics within a unique client environment, without multiplying accounts, tools or user journeys. ".
" We are probably experiencing the most significant transformation in business technology since the advent of the cloud », summarises Salomé Mogier, Chief Commercial Officer at Hcorpo, who nevertheless specifies that this development does not replace human expertise: « Artificial intelligence does not replace the expertise of Travel Managers, procurement officers or finance departments. It allows them to access the right information instantly and make better decisions. "
