A last autumnThe IHG group had already enhanced the booking experience on its site by allowing its loyal customers to choose a room with a sea view or with a bath, to reserve access to the lounge or to select offers specific to each hotel. All of this was achieved using the latest generation of cloud solutions, in particular through its partnership with Amadeus.
Soon, in the second half of 2024, customers will have at their disposal a travel planner at your fingertipswithin the IHG One Rewards. Travellers will be able to ask the Travel Planner to help them organise their holidays and find ideas to make their trips more enjoyable. Before other features are added over time, the British group is already giving examples of the first possible responses from its Travel Planner: "Give me four late-night dining options near the InterContinental London Park Lane" or "Does the Kimpton Shinjuku hotel in Tokyo accept pets?" or "What jazz concerts are taking place near the Holiday Inn Express Manhattan Times Square South on the weekend of 12 October?".
As you might expect, this development relies on artificial intelligence to generate these recommendations, all in partnership with Google Cloud technologiesa supplier to IHG since 2022, on the occasion of the migration of part of its data to BigQuery, the virtual datawarehouse of the Mountain View firm. The future travel planner will be developed using Vertex AI, Google Cloud's AI platform, and Google's Gemini models.
" Our personalized travel planner will use GenAI to help people discover destinations across our more than 6,000 IHG hotels across 19 brands in more than 100 countries," said Jolie Fleming, chief technology officer, IHG Hotels & Resorts. Soon, guests will use the IHG One Rewards mobile app as a true mobile travel companion to build a complete itinerary and book hotels with just a few clicks." . For his part, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, commented on this new feature " raising the bar in the way the hotel industry conceives digital customer experiences"..
