Voice Reservations

After Marriott announced it was introducing Amazon’s Echo devices into its rooms, the internet lit up with debates about the eventual appearance of voice-controlled reservations.

I was surprised how many people doubt that this will actually become reality. The main argument of naysayers is that during their reservation process they want to be able to see pictures, read reviews and learn about prepayment and cancellation policies. Exclusively voice-driven solutions will clearly fail here. But what if they are bundled with your computer, a TV-screen or your smartphone? 

Voice bundled with visual support is extremely powerful. Remember what it used to be like when you visited a travel agent? With a colourful brochure in front of you, the reservation agent would vocally answer all your questions about the reservation. I have no doubts that within the next decade voice-driven reservation agents will emerge. 

A major challenge is to know which system we’ll use to book our hotel rooms in the future.

There are currently 4 players fighting over the huge voice market: Microsoft with Cortana, Apple with Siri, Google with Google Voice and finally Amazon with Alexa. They are surely all interested in offering this service and receiving the juicy commissions that will come with it. But as of today none of the fantastic 4 have taken serious steps toward online hotel booking. Google has shown some interest over the last couple of years but never actively pursued the idea of becoming an OTA itself. None of them have started gathering hotel data for their own system, so it looks like they will want to take it from other sources. But which one or which ones?

Logical data sources would be Booking Holdings or Expedia Group, as they probably have the most extensive lodging databases. It’s also possible that voice-driven reservation will debut with one of the larger hotel chains. But even though the technology is already available, the learning curve towards powerful AI-based question/response patterns will be long. I’m not sure hotel chains would be willing to risk their reputations on these kinds of projects. For Expedia Group and Booking Holdings it would seem a more logical step, especially since both like to state a hypothesis, implement it, measure the results and decide whether or not to continue or to abandon it. Their strong data-driven philosophy will be of great help for such a project. 

Who will pair up with who? For a player such as Google, partnering with Booking Holdings and Expedia would be a good continuation of their current Google Ads partnership. However, moving towards voice-driven solutions would no longer display AdWords and thus compromise this important revenue stream. It will be interesting to see how the other three voice players will enter the game.

If we can safely assume that voice reservation will be backed by one of the bigger players on the market, what does this mean for hotels? Direct booking has been an obsession for many hoteliers over the last couple of years. Unless the voice players design their voice reservation gateways in a similar way to the current metasearch engines, allowing smaller players to connect and provide their content, the future of direct booking is pretty bleak. 

All of this might seem farfetched and some might think I’ve been watching too many sci-fi films. However, the fact that voice room control and voice ordering are already part of the real world show that this trend is there.

Such a clearly promising technology will not stop there.