With 126 hotels opening this year in Asia Pacific, you could say Hilton is growing at its fastest in the region, although Ben George, APAC SVP & commercial director, concedes, not as fast as generative AI is developing.
“This whole AI vertical is growing so fast,” he told me during one of his many swings through Singapore from his base in Manila. “We are holding training sessions and we are using more and more of it at work and in our call centres. For high volume, low value work, it is brilliant – repetitive questions from customers and team members, for example.
Ben George: “We want to give customers as many reasons to book direct but if you are a loyal customer to Agoda or Expedia, we want to be there too.”
“Forecasting – we are rolling out our enterprise forecast management and in a matter of weeks, it will be fully automated. We have 250-300 analysts in Shanghai who are very much in tune with the use of AI in forecasting and increasingly, we are hiring people straight from universities with no hotel experience.”
Hiring differently as well as deploying new tech tools are necessary at a time when Hilton is ramping up its expansion in what George, who has been with Hilton for three decades, calls “our best year in terms of hotels” as well as an intense, fast-paced recovery from the slump of Covid.
“Business is so good at the moment that it’s difficult to manage. I mean, revenues fell by 80% in 2020 and now first quarter, booking pace is up 100% year on year. That’s not surprising, given the suffering of Q1 last year.”
He said that China and Japan were showing the highest growth, purely because they just reopened. “Japan just fully relaxed all restrictions, it’s one of the last countries to do so. China’s extreme growth is domestic driven; we are not yet seeing the inbound/outbound rush, which is tied to airline capacity. Australia, South-east Asia, India – all are still well ahead, 20-30% ahead of 2019. The second half will get better with China coming back.”
George expects that growth will slow down. “We can’t keep growing at 100%. The mix will change. We will see leisure travel being replaced by big groups, the big conventions are returning. We don’t see any signs of a general slowdown ahead.”
“It matters where you stay”, app innovations to solve pain points
Hilton is also seeing changes in customer behaviour especially that of corporate travellers combining business trips with leisure. In Singapore, for instance, where it has four hotels, the length of stay of business travellers increased by an average of 15% in Q1 2023 vs Q1 2019.
George said with consumers now seeing an average of 5,000 brand messages a day, brands have to change the way they interact with their customers.
Hilton launched its new campaign, “It matters where you stay” in Asia Pacific, starting with China last October. “Prior to the pandemic, the message had been the destination but we’ve found that the stay is what’s important. The stay can make or break a trip.”
The objective is to improve stickiness of the Hilton Honors app “by giving members reasons to constantly use it”.
This emphasis on the stay experience goes hand in hand with its doubling down on its Hilton Honors programme, which has more than 158m members worldwide, of whom 36m are in Asia Pacific, as well as innovating within the app.
George said the objective is to improve the stickiness of the app “by giving members reasons to constantly use it. We innovate to solve pain points.”
“The app allows customers to dream by enabling them to choose their room, they can see the room relative to the area and the views. Once they choose that, they can check in – so they don’t have to worry where my room is, they don’t have to queue, they check in through the app. They don’t have to worry about losing their keys since the key is tokenised within the app. It also has an environmental impact because we do away with plastic cards.”
A total of 62.8m digital keys have been downloaded since launching in 2015 and the number of operating properties with digital key capability in APAC is 167.
Another area of innovation is allowing families to confirm connecting rooms. “We are the first hotel to do that at scale,” said George. “Travel can be a stressful experience, we want to remove the stress points.”
Upcoming innovations include the digitising of the food & beverage experience – to decouple dining from staying – and online bookings for meetings. “Customers are used to booking bedrooms online, it’s less common for meetings. We want to enable simple meetings to be booked online, it’s more complicated.”
And just as “it matters where you stay”, it also “matters where you play” with the growing trend of travellers seeking local experiences.
Asked if the human concierge will remain a fixture in hotels given the rise of generative AI in the field of itinerary planning, George said, “It depends on the hotel. At hotels like Waldorf Astoria or the Conrad, Singapore, there will always be a place for concierges. The hospitality experience is about people serving people. Yes, sometimes AI can replace but mostly, it augments.”
He cites the front desk as an example. “For the longest time, the receptionist had to use quite a complicated system to check in, fill in, like 5,000 fields, and they spent their time looking down a lot and not engaging with the customer. A couple of years ago, we moved to a cloud-based property engagement platform – much simpler, fewer fields – and staff now have more time with customers.”
Strong recovery by OTAs, Hilton opens more flagship stores in China
Commenting on the strong recovery of OTAs, he said, “OTAs have come back stronger because leisure came back strongly and naturally, OTAs lend themselves to that. That will ease as business travel returns more strongly.”
He said OTAs too were evolving more into OTPs (online travel platforms). Hilton opened a flagship store in Fliggy more than two years ago which has proven “incredibly successful”. It also has a store on Ctrip and will open a third soon on another platform, yet to be disclosed.
“Our mantra is, we have to be where customers choose to book. We want to give customers as many reasons to book direct but if you are a loyal customer to Agoda or Expedia, we want to be there too.”
Broadly speaking, he said more than 70% of business comes direct on brand.com, with percentages varying depending on the maturity of the markets. In his three decades, he’s also seen the business shift towards more intra-regional, and that could prove to be a blessing today, given the global uncertainties out there.
Conrad Singapore Orchard, a rebrand from the former Regent, scheduled to fully reopen in early 2024, following extensive room refurbishments.
Asia Pacific could provide its own cushion during these volatile times when longhaul travel might diminish. At the same time, George said, with 60% of the world’s population living in Asia, the West could become more reliant on the region five to 10 years from now. “India is growing rapidly. Three of the world’s top five economies are in Asia – China, India, Japan.”
Born in the UK, George started his hospitality career as a chef and worked in various hospitality positions in Europe. and came to Asia on a Y2K project – “remember when we thought computers would all stop working,” he laughed. “I was training hotels for that scenario.”
That first visit to Kuala Lumpur was enough to convince him that this was the future for him. “I was impressed by the energy and the hot weather.”
Given his long experience and background, he’s therefore more sanguine about crises and doomsayers’ predictions. “Remember 911 and everyone said people will not fly again. And they did. Covid was a longer crisis but people are travelling again.”
As such, when asked about trends such as remote and hybrid work, he said, “We need to be careful not to make a knee jerk reaction to a moment in time. I do believe people will gravitate towards normalcy. During the dark times, people asked, what will it do to travel, offices? Now the number of people coming in each day is exponentially higher.
“No doubt elements of the pandemic will remain – Zoom, Teams – which is great but nothing will replace the energy of being together physically. The data is proving that out.”