Sebastien Leitner
They never came back on the return. And so we started looking at their content, and it’s because everywhere they said luxurious and not luxury. It was that simple. We got that word changed. They started showing up.
One word.
Two five star hotels in New York invisible in AI search because of one word. Welcome to The Turned Out. I’m Sebastian Leitner, if you run a hotel, this is the episode you will want to send to your marketing team before lunch.
My guest today is Carol Halesel, founder and CEO of Dragonfly. Carol has spent her career weaving back and forth between hotel companies and tech companies. Reservations and revenue leadership going back to the nineties, Kimpton Mandarin Oriental, and she now runs a commercial IT and operations advisory firm where eighty five percent of the clients are independent and boutique hotels.
Three rooms to eleven hundred.
She sits on the HSMIA Foundation board. She is a fierce advocate for the next generation of hospitality talent, and she is the person owners call when their tech stack has quietly become fifty products doing the work of twenty. Here is what we get into. Why Carol refuses to say artificial intelligence, in which she calls it instead.
The most expensive mistake she sees hotels make over and over again in revenue management.
Why deflagging is making some owners real money and quietly destroying others.
What AI listening to your phone lines can tell you about the fourteenth floor before your ticketing system ever catches it.
And whether independents will win the AI race or get lapped by the OTAs while they are still writing beautiful copy nobody searches for. If you get something out of this episode, you can do us a huge favor: follow the show, leave us a rating, and send this episode to the one person in your org who owns your website content. They’ll thank you, eventually. One more thing before we get started.
I asked Carol what keeps her up at night. She didn’t see her eye. She didn’t see margins.
She said something about the snow. And by the end of this conversation, you’ll understand why that answer is really about your revenue too. Let’s get into it.
Carol, it is a pleasure to have you on the program today. Welcome to The Turndown.
Caryl Helsel
Thank you so much, Sebastian. It’s great to see you and thank you for having me.
Sebastien Leitner
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’d like to kick us off with our standard opening question, which is what is keeping you up at night these days? Carol, floor is yours.
Caryl Helsel
Yeah. What is keeping me up besides my two little dogs that don’t seem to want to sleep?
Let’s see. You know, one thing I’m based in Colorado, in Denver, Colorado. And one thing that keeps me up on a regular basis is, honestly, environmental change and how that’s impacting tourism across the world. You know, we’ve had a really rough year here in the West for snow, and now the high risk of fires. And so I just get extremely concerned about what’s gonna happen personally to that industry, and that’s a huge tourism impact out west.
So we’ve gotta figure that out, and we need to solve for it.
Another thing, I don’t want to go too far down the AI path, but I want to make sure that we use it ethically and responsibly in the hospitality space. I’m really excited about some of the things that are happening, but I also believe it’s augmented intelligence and not artificial, and I don’t think it’s going to replace hospitality anytime soon, in my opinion. I think there’s a lot it can do to help us become more efficient. But I do sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, and how much our lives are gonna change on a go forward basis.
And when it comes to independent hotels, I get very concerned that we could either shine in this moment and do really well with independent and boutique hotel content, or we could lose our position if we don’t know how to optimize for AI. And so that often kicks me up just thinking about the beautiful, amazing independent boutique hotels that make up eighty percent of Dragonfly’s clients. I don’t want them to lose out in the AI game, so we want to help them solve for that.
Sebastien Leitner
Lots to unravel. Lots to keep you up at night. I want to start a little bit just on setting the stage for the climate change or at least wrap that up. You’re in Denver, and you I mean, the resorts in, I guess, the Rocky Mountains had a terrible winter. Is that fair? Is that a good description?
Caryl Helsel
That is a totally great description. Yeah, it’s been we are the worst snowpack that we’ve had ever right now, you know, and we feed the Colorado River, which gives water to seven states. So it’s a big concern.
Sebastien Leitner
So drought, potentially, and no snow?
Caryl Helsel
Yeah, no snow. Very little, very little snow this year. So it hit the hotels hard in all of the ski towns. Utah and Colorado were especially bad this year, and it has a negative impact on hotels, on tourism in general, and Colorado and Utah as a whole.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. And it was throughout the West Coast, right? It wasn’t anywhere?
Caryl Helsel
There were a few places that got a lot more snow.
Know, Sierra Nevada got quite a bit, but they had a lot of melt and runoff early. They’re getting another snowstorm right now, so who knows? But, yeah, it’s a lot of abreast.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Well, would keep me up at night.
Do you do personally, or you still put ski boots and ski shoes on at times or
Caryl Helsel
Do you do personally, or you still put ski boots and ski shoes on at times or
No. No. I I’ve gotten to the point I’ve broken a few bones in my life, so I’ve decided, you know, I don’t need that.
And my son snowboards enough for the whole family, so we’re
Sebastien Leitner
And my son snowboards enough for the whole family, so we’re
So you’re spending enough time on the slopes? Yes, yes.
Then the other topic you mentioned was AI, and I loved how you defined it. You called it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Why do you make that distinction?
Caryl Helsel
Because it’s not all fake. Like, I think the word artificial, to me, psychologically, I equate that with lying and faking And I don’t think it’s artificial. I think that AI can augment our intelligence. It can make us more efficient.
It can provide information more quickly in a call center environment or a PBX environment. It can arm our teams with the information that they need in order to be more successful in what they’re doing. And I think that if we can think about it in a positive light rather than a lot of the negative that has been published around it.
That said, there is an environmental impact with AI and data centers as well. So, you know, all of that together is a concern.
But I just think, to me, I believe the artificial word is wrong. It’s not artificial.
And it really is about becoming more efficient, about providing more information to make quicker decisions, about improving guest friction points where we just can’t staff up enough to provide an excellent guest experience or employee experience for that matter.
Sebastien Leitner
So you almost equate artificial with being something negative. Is that fair? Yeah.
Yeah. I Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I want to introduce Carol to our audience.
Who are you? What do you do right now? You are the CEO and founder of Dragonfly, a consulting company that focuses on, as you described, mostly on independent hotels. Is that a fair summary? What would you add?
Caryl Helsel
Yeah, I would add we’re a commercial IT and operations advisory firm. We have about fifty percent of our business as subscription, outsourced revenue distribution marketing services, and the other fifty percent is advisory. On the services side, our clients are eighty five percent independent boutique or small to medium sized hotel companies. On the advisory side, I will say we work with individual small hotels. We’ve worked with a club that’s playing as small as three hotels or three rooms, engaging with a six room one right now, up to a huge resort in Arizona that’s over eleven hundred rooms that’s being built right now, to working with some of the big brands on advisory. It definitely varies on the advisory side.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s amazing. How did you end up with Dragonfly? I’m just curious, there must be an inflection point or something that caused you to kick that off.
Caryl Helsel
So to start the company or the name Dragonfly?
Sebastien Leitner
Both.
Caryl Helsel
Both.
Alright. So, well, I had had a company before and had a business partner in that, and she happened to have twins the same time I moved my parents in. So we decided to kind of go back to the dark side. We always joked about that, not having our own business and going back to corporate hospitality.
And then we did that for a few years, and I decided I really wanted to go out on my own again. I moved from Santa Monica back to Phoenix to start the company, and really wanted to provide services that would enable a small to medium sized hotel company or an independent boutique hotel to have sort of an outsourced home office. I call it home. That’s what we called it at Kempton.
So an outsourced home office that would provide commercial and services. We added operations after a couple of years after we kind of came out of started coming out of COVID. In twenty twenty three, we added operations. And so I really felt that there were a lot of hotel companies that just didn’t have the ability or the payroll to pay for the talent they needed to ultimately be successful, but they could pay for it fractionally.
And so that was our initial approach on it. My background, I personally run our technology advisory. And so my background has been weaving from hotel company to tech company, always in the hospitality space, back and forth.
And I felt, you know, with independent and boutique hotels, there was so much fragmentation.
And we would walk into places that would have fifty different technologies, oftentimes tripling, with three of them having the same functionality, just different departments doing it, you know? Because they just let people go buy whatever they wanted, what would solve for their problem. And so we saw this need for technology advisory and really tech stack design, and a tech stack design that is focused on what’s the aspirational guest employee and private club member experience you want to deliver, because we do work with a lot of private clubs as well. And starting that process with that lens, to me, is extremely important.
And so, you know, I wanted to be able to engage in that with owners and operators and, you know, really be part of influencing the technology side of things. And my partner, Elise Dee, came on as our Chief Revenue Officer at the beginning and really built out revenue services. And so that’s how we started. Dragonfly, the name.
I’ve always been a big fan of three types of animals. Insect is a dragonfly. I know, but I’ll call it an animal. Dragonfly, giraffes, and dogs.
So dog strategists kind of sounded weird.
Giraffe strategists, I love them, but I was like, you know, dragonfly goes a little bit better. And I loved them growing up. My mom used to play Nina Simone’s song all the time for me about dragonfly up in the sky, you know what I mean, is one of the lines. And then when I worked for Mandarin Oriental, at one of our sales and marketing meetings in Singapore, had a dragonfly land on my hand. And my good friend at Mandarin said, That means good fortune for life.
So as I started studying dragonflies, they are the most agile insect. They can fly forwards, backwards, side to side. They have three sixty view on their head, and they usually get their prey.
And in the Asian culture, which I’m very drawn to, I love Asia Pacific, it stands for transformation. And so that’s what we want to do at Dragonfly is be part of transforming the hotel industry and also for our clients to bring transformative solutions so that they can all perform better and drive more revenue, which is the key.
Sebastien Leitner
I love the Dragonfly story. That’s an amazing and and thank you for educating me on the biological capabilities of that animal. But it’s so on brand, right?
Caryl Helsel
Yeah, I mean, people ask me that question. We actually published something that explained it, because I get asked on a regular basis, and it is a somewhat unusual name, right, in the hospitality space. But when you know what a dragonfly can do, and you know what a dragonfly stands for, that’s who we are.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah.
And when you take on a project, when it comes to sort of like tech advisory, right, how do you approach this? Let’s say a hotel owner is looking at his tech stack today and realizes it’s twenty years old. I don’t know what to do. Is that when they call you? Or is that almost too late?
Caryl Helsel
No, they often call us when they know they need to make a change. And we also are very involved in pre opening for a number of new brands that are being built out. And that is unusually fun because you have a blank slate. They haven’t picked a single piece of technology.
And so, you know, that side of it gets really fun. When you walk into situations where, Yeah, we want to replace this and this, but these two things can’t change. You know, that limits what you can do, right?
And so, you know, where we start is what I mentioned before. We really want to understand what is the guest journey you want to deliver? What’s the employee journey you want to deliver, and sometimes people forget that part of it, but it’s very important. And then if they have a private members club, what is the member experience you want to deliver?
And, you know, from a guest standpoint, we look at it at guests in food and beverage, or guests in the hotel, right? So really talking through that experience. So we do journey mapping. We sit down, we ask a ton of questions, and we map out what that journey is.
And then in the journey map itself, we say, These are the technology companies that can fulfill this. We prefer to still use RFPs. I know some people don’t prefer that anymore, but the reason we do is that we want to be sure that the most important things to that client can be done by the tech stack, right? And we need to understand the integrations side of it, and what can work within that ecosystem. But there are times when our clients say, Hey, we don’t have time. We just want you to help us narrow it down to three, and then we’ll do the deep dives with all of them, and we’ll select from there. And we’ll do that if that’s what a client wants to do.
But that means they’re putting a great deal of trust in us to guide them in the right direction. And I believe we can do that, but I also always want to be sure that the due diligence, appropriate due diligence, is done.
But, you know, to us, it really goes back to what are you trying to do? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s the experience you’re trying to deliver? And then let’s talk about what tech can deliver. We had a hotel, for example, I’ll give you an example.
We didn’t engage with them pre opening, they engaged with us about six months after they were open.
And the owners, amazing woman, we love Not that we don’t love working with men owners, but there aren’t that many female owners of hotels, and so it’s really fun when we get to partner with another lady leader. She had selected a property management system and her whole vision was that she wanted mobile check-in and kiosks. This was a few years ago, right? When she, thirty days before opening, she found out the one she selected couldn’t support that. So she had to rip it out and put in another system.
And so, you know, just those two questions getting answered at the top would have saved her a lot of pain. So I think it’s very wise at a minimum to ask your deal breaker questions because you need to know whether someone can do what you need them to do or not.
Sebastien Leitner
What’s the hardest system for a hotelier to change, in your opinion?
Caryl Helsel
You know, I used to say PMS, but purchasing an inventory and recipes are man, those systems are so hard!
Sebastien Leitner
Does that mean that PMSs have become better?
Caryl Helsel
I mean, I think it depends on the PMS, right? I think Cloudbeds is a pretty straightforward, easy onboarding. You can onboard team members easily that can be up and using it in like an hour.
And then there are other systems out there that take a lot more effort to install and a lot more effort to onboard employees, right, and get them optimized in how they’re using it and adopting everything that is available to them.
But from a migration standpoint, I think that purchasing inventory systems are just really challenging. And it’s really challenging, especially if a hotel’s never had one, because you have to do so much change management with all of your department heads, with your accounting department.
If you don’t have a centralized receiving area, You have to find a space in your hotel to do that, and there’s just so much change management that has to happen.
But I do think on the PMS side, what’s great is that so many companies are adding more and more functionality, so you may not need to have a channel manager because your PMS might be able to do that for you, right? So I think that PMSs have made it easier by including multiple type products within them, so that you don’t have to have as many integrations.
Sebastien Leitner
Is there a system or a system type that you see disappearing right now in hotels?
Caryl Helsel
Yeah, I mean, I think what I’m seeing is a lot of consolidation. And so, the standalone texting platforms, for example, know, PMSs now often have that. CRMs offer it. Your guest engagement platforms offer it. If they’re not being acquired by one of those, they may not be around much longer, right? Because there are so many different places that you can put your guest communication.
I definitely am seeing, you know, certain things in rooms greatly change. So entertainment, in room entertainment, is very different than it used to be, obviously, with streaming capabilities and with people wanting to feel like they’re at home in a hotel.
Really think it’s really about looking at hotel companies are tired of having twenty five different companies they have to deal with in their tech stack. So that’s why I kind of draw it back to consolidation because there are companies like Cloudbeds who are offering more things now, and that then makes some of these standalone products irrelevant.
Sebastien Leitner
And makes it easier for hotels to, I guess, choose, pick and Exactly.
Yeah. What’s one of the most expensive mistakes you see hotels make over and over again?
Caryl Helsel
There are a couple of things. One is they install new technology and don’t change how they do business.
And so, why did they even change to begin with?
Because they’re not using ninety five percent of the functionality that they were paying for. And so just adoption of technology in general. I mean, I have seen people install purchasing systems, and then accounting and F and B never use it. And they’re not inexpensive systems to install or to buy.
And so, before you make a decision to spend all that money, make sure you have the commitment to do the change management to make sure your team can adopt it. So that’s a huge mistake I see happen. I also see, for example, I know that we’ve talked a little bit, Sebastian, about deflagging with hotels. And what we’ve seen in that regard is that somebody will deflag and they have a revenue leader, for example, that worked for the flag, and now it’s an independent hotel, and they don’t realize they don’t have someone back there at corporate to do everything for them.
And so they’ll go live, but they can’t receive any bookings because they haven’t opened up any distribution channels, they haven’t built anything out, they haven’t changed their Expedia contract, or their Booking dot com you know, there’s just so much that if you are depending on a brand oriented person to do an independent install, that usually doesn’t go as well, because they are not used to having responsibility for all of those things. There’s a distribution department that you can submit your rate loading to, right? But in this case, you have to do it yourself. So we see that happen.
And then the third area that we see people really losing a lot of money is in their Revenue Management system configuration and not going in and optimizing that on a quarterly basis. The economy, the market, that things change rapidly, and you want to be sure that your configuration is optimized for today and not optimized for a year ago. And a lot of people never go into the back end and adjust configuration. And we walk into situations where you know, people will say, Well, the rate’s always the same, so why should I use it for group quoting?
And then you go look in the RMS, and every day is overridden to a rate that is not being released, not being managed anymore by the revenue system. And it’s because their configuration is wrong, but nobody knows how to optimize that configuration, right? And so, we see a lot of money left on the table with that.
Sebastien Leitner
So, in other words, they have a revenue management system, but they don’t make use of it because they’re still, you know, living in a manual world, or they prefer
Caryl Helsel
So, in other words, they have a revenue management system, but they don’t make use of it because they’re still, you know, living in a manual world, or they prefer
So they don’t know how to do a wash override or forecast override or whatever. So they just go in and override the rate to whatever they think is right. And typically when you do that, then the revenue management system can’t control that rate anymore until you release it to let it control it again, right? And so, you know, we just see a lot of money being left on the table, either with unoccupied rooms because the rates are too high, or occupied rooms at a much lower rate than you should have sold them, right? So, a lot of money left on the table there.
Sebastien Leitner
Yeah. You mentioned deflagging. It’s an area, of course, that I’m interested in, because I see sort of two things happening. I see some independent hotels join, you know, many of the soft brands that are, you know, a lot of these big hotel corporations have come up with to provide marketing services and loyalty programs.
But then we also see many hotels, and you mentioned your participation, our deflagging guide, that are, you know, taking that leap of faith and becoming independent. What are you seeing? Is there a trend in both directions? What are you seeing happening?
Caryl Helsel
There’s a trend in both directions. I would say yes. I would say there are a lot of management companies that will encourage owners to go with brands. There are a lot of owners that go with brands because they get better financing. Because the brand has this assurance in investors’ minds of being able to make more money.
But that is not always the case. And so there is a case for both, for brands and independents, but you need to run a realistic performer to see what is the impact of what you’re going pay for loyalty and brand fees. And are you going to be a high redemption hotel? Are you going to have enough control around those high redemptions? Right?
And so we, in our revenue team, have a really strong process for going through and running numbers to say, Should you brand? Should you not brand? You know, we have been involved in several deflag situations, and the hotels are making more money. The owners are making more money today than they were with the brand.
However, when you deflag, you’ve got to make sure you have the right partners to help you with that process and to work with you to optimize your revenue, and make sure that your distribution is dialed in, and make sure that you have strong sales and marketing, and that your digital spend is in the right place, and that your tech stack works if you have to take out a brand tech stack, right? So there’s a lot to it. And where we see deflagging fail is when those things are not taken into consideration because, you know, the brand has a lot of power and a lot of recognition and a lot of loyalty.
And so if you don’t have a plan for counteracting that, then you probably shouldn’t take the brand off your hotel.
And so, you know, I think it’s going to be interesting because there are a couple of views where a lot of people think that AI for search, GEO, you know, is gonna help the independent hotel more than it does the brand.
I don’t know where I am on that at this point because I’m concerned that the independent hotels don’t have their content optimized, and the brands might get there faster, or Expedia might get there faster, or Booking dot com might get there faster, right? And so, you know, I do think that, you know, if you are making this choice, you’ve got to know in the future, people are going to be searching in a very different way, and your content has to be optimized, has to be accurate, has to be ready to be read in conversation with AI. Right? And so I am a bit concerned about our independent small to medium sized hotel companies, boutiques.
Are we going to lose? Are we going to win in this race? And I don’t. The only way we’re going win is if we make sure our contents optimized.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s for the EI, the future search. Okay, Okay.
Caryl Helsel
Yeah, but you know, we’ve seen hotels that have deflagged and then they didn’t increase their digital marketing budget. Where’s your marketing going to come from if you don’t have the brand at that point? Right? So again, you can’t do it lightly. You have to have the right plan, the right partners, the right people managing your hotel, delivering that guest experience.
It’s
Sebastien Leitner
It’s
Flag or deflag?
Caryl Helsel
It’s a huge factor. I live in Denver, so I’ll use this as an example.
You know, looking out my window, I live downtown, so there are a number of boutiques and they do very well here.
When you’re in central Denver, you get outside of here, like there’s, there are a couple of hotels that have recently decided to go the flag route that are more in Rhine and Roussin. They struggle a lot more because there’s just not enough demand coming into those markets, and there may be a lot of BT coming into those markets, and those are often driven more with the brands, right? Because a lot of big companies consolidate who they negotiate with for business travel. So, know, location matters, and destination matters as well. Like, are you in a destination, or are you in a suburb, right?
And the the the demand patterns are different and how you get business in your door is different depending on that.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Interesting. We talked briefly about revenue management, and you’ve been involved in revenue management from probably day one.
Caryl Helsel
Yeah. Yeah. I led reservations and revenue from Mandarin back in the nineties. So yeah, it’s been a while.
Sebastien Leitner
Been a while. From your point of view, what’s changed in the last twenty years when it comes to revenue management?
Caryl Helsel
Twenty years? How about the last year?
Sebastien Leitner
Okay, well, but the reason I bring this question up is like, revenue management have claimed the AI throne for a long time. They’ve had machine learning for a long time. Right? But it seems to me that, especially in the last year, that revenue management has become sexy again on the back of AI and large language models becoming a bit more, I guess, common themes in, you know, in your weekend conversations. Yeah. So what’s changing?
Caryl Helsel
Well, I mean, over the last twenty years, my goodness, just on the resource side, a lot has changed. You used to have a dedicated revenue manager at every hotel, and now it’s more regional. Or, you know, you have someone managing four or five hotels instead of one.
You know, and in the case of limited service, maybe twelve to fifteen hotels are being managed.
So I think that just the resource and the structure of how we do revenue has changed. I also think, you know, a revenue leader really needs to move into being a commercial leader because they need to understand digital. They need to understand everything related to that. They need to understand sales.
They need to understand, maybe not have to do it all themselves, but understand how distribution works. So, you know, there is a lot that is on the revenue leader’s plate that wasn’t necessarily on it twenty years ago. I would also say that it’s more often that you do have a revenue management system now than it used to be twenty years ago, right? Again, I go back to you’ve got to configure those things correctly to get the outcome that you want, right?
And I think there’s a lot more trust in that machine learning and in those systems’ algorithms than there used to be. So there are more leaders who do trust their system and they manage the exceptions than there were twenty years ago.
So there’s a lot more acceptance of that, and I think a lot more understanding of how the science and the art work together. I believe the human brings the art and the system brings the science, and you have to have that work together well, or you’re not gonna ultimately be successful.
Also would say that people used to have this, Elise likes to say this a lot, people used to have this view that revenue management was changing rates by ten dollars And it’s not. There’s so much more to it. It’s merchandising. It’s understanding merchandising. It’s understanding how you drive demand. It is much more partnered with marketing than it’s ever been in the past, past, right? And so I think the collaborative nature of what we do and the conversations that need to be commercial conversations and not just revenue management have become so much more critical to success than they used to be.
And, you know, the systems have changed. The algorithms have grown. They’ve improved. They’ve gotten better.
The forecast accuracy has improved. The ability to even have inventory working individually within one hotel by having them kind of split and not tied to each other, that has really changed the game in how to optimize revenue for every single room type that you have. And we’ve also made it more efficient. Mean, there’s more automation.
Most people don’t have to send out a manual daily pace report anymore. It just goes out and know because systems do it for them. And hopefully, what that allows is the revenue leader to spend more time on strategy and less time on putting reports together.
Sebastien Leitner
You make a really interesting point, which is sort of the argument that revenue management is that it’s about commercial optimization, right? It’s, you know, we no longer have chief revenue managers. We have chief commercial officers, if you will.
My question to you, though, is how much is that aspirational versus reality today? Because I I, I don’t see the industry embracing digital marketing, promotional activity, loyalty, revenue management, sales in one commercial function yet completely. Do you see that happening?
Caryl Helsel
Some of the brands have definitely done that, and they have moved to a chief commercial You don’t see it as much on property. Right? And so I think, you know, what we do at Dragonfly, because we have a lot of clients that we are revenue leaders, we rotate through and we pull all those people together. Like, it’s the time to do it. So our revenue calls rotate through.
We have one week that is focused on sales, one week that is focused on marketing, and the digital agency joins that call along with the marketing team. We have one week that is really focused on results when we finally get the star report, And then we have kind of the fourth week that is really focused on just strategy demand. Here’s the forecast for the next ninety days. Like, what do we need to do to impact that? And then we also on the fifth week is when we talk about content and AI optimization and all that type of thing, right? So we’ve changed the structure of our calls to really be commercial strategy calls instead of revenue strategy calls.
And we don’t believe we can remotely be as successful without that collaboration with sales, marketing, and quite frankly, operations as well. So, you know, I think our individual hotels moving to that, some big resorts are, I will say that. I have seen big resorts have either VP of Commercial Strategy or Chief Commercial Officer even at some really large resorts. I think that what needs to happen is those conversations need to change. Even if you don’t have a Chief Commercial Officer, you, as a revenue leader, you can drive that collaboration because you’re the one driving the meeting every week. So, you know, being sure that you’re engaging the right people on your hotel team, on your digital marketing team, and your agency on a regular basis is critically important to commercial success.
Sebastien Leitner
The theme of content keeps popping up, right? Like, get your content right, get your content optimized. Especially, if I understand you correctly, in light of, I guess, a new dawn of search.
Correct.
Right? And I’m, I’m sure you’re referring to the, I guess, agentic AI wave that everyone is anticipating. Conversational.
Caryl Helsel
Yep. That’s what I’m Conversational.
Sebastien Leitner
Yep. That’s what I’m Conversational.
Yep. Is that how we’re going to book our next hotel stay in the future?
Caryl Helsel
Very potentially, it’s already happening. The margin rates are going up, there are places where you can go and you can book all the way through and never go to the hotel’s website already, right? So, you know, I think what we’re seeing with that content, I think it’s not necessarily always that the content that the hotel has is bad. It’s that it may not be a natural language. I’m going give you a couple of you know, marketers love to market, and they have beautiful language around marketing, which is lovely, right? However, someone doesn’t necessarily go on to an agent.
They don’t go into ChatGPT and say, what are the luxurious hotels in New York City? They say, could you find a luxury hotel in New York City that has a room for two adults and two children traveling along with a pet? Right? And so what we found is that there are a couple of very high end hotels we work with in New York, and they never came back on the return.
And so we started looking at their content, and it’s because everywhere they said luxurious and not luxury. It was that simple. We got that word changed, they started showing up. We also have a hotel that talked about having the most amazing rooftop oasis, but nowhere did it say there was a rooftop bar or a rooftop restaurant.
And so we had to change that language. Yes, a rooftop oasis sounds amazing, and you can still talk about your rooftop oasis, but somewhere you need to really put what it is in what people are going to ask for, right? And so that’s where I’m talking about content. Like, how do we make sure our content can answer what people are asking via AI, right? And what AI then is going go out and search for. And that’s what worries me because our content is not necessarily natural language.
Sebastien Leitner
Right? No. No. But you make an argument for less fluff, less marketing language, more facts. Is that fair?
Caryl Helsel
Yeah. Facts. I mean, even just having strong FAQs on your website will improve how you return.
And a lot of websites don’t have FAQs.
Sebastien Leitner
When you say strong FAQ, what do you mean by that?
Caryl Helsel
So, frequently asked questions. You know, things like, what time is room service available? What are the spa services that you offer? How can I book golf?
You know, asking things like, is your pool heated? I mean, just all these types of things. For pets, like, what is your pet policy? How large can the pet be?
Is there a fee associated with it? Those types of things are important, right? And so answering those questions, every hotel has them somewhere. Like, someone is answering the phone, taking reservations, so they have this data somewhere, right?
It just may not be in the right place right now.
And so we’re encouraging all of our hotels to have a frequently asked questions page, an FAQ page,
Sebastien Leitner
And so we’re encouraging all of our hotels to have a frequently asked questions page, an FAQ page,
Caryl Helsel
And so we’re encouraging all of our hotels to have a frequently asked questions page, an FAQ page,
Sebastien Leitner
That’s amazing. I mean, it almost sounds like the the FAQ component is about depth, right, and being able to to anticipate the questions that your customers may have.
Caryl Helsel
One hundred percent. And what’s really cool two things that are these are a little bit separate from content, but I guess one is related. So if you have an AI agent that answers your PBX calls, or your call center calls, you get reports on a daily basis, typically, of what could it not answer.
Sebastien Leitner
And
Caryl Helsel
And
And then you can go put those answers somewhere from the content that you’re getting from the agent, and then you’ll reduce and increase the calls for information that AI can handle and get the sales calls to the reservation agent or get the actual guest calls that need to actually speak to a person versus asking for towels to be delivered to the room, which could be done by AI and sent off to Hot Sauce or Alice or Optee, right?
So, you know, I think that that is an important component of all of this, is that you can learn every day.
The other piece that I think is interesting is we’ve partnered with a company with a number of our hotels where we have started AI has started handling PBX.
And what they’re able to do is notice the trends in operational issues before even the ticketing system does, because they’ve got all the people asking, and AI will go through and say to you, Floor fourteen is getting all kinds of air conditioning complaints. You need to go do PM on all your air conditioners. There’s something wrong on Floor fourteen.
And it’ll do it from, like, three days of data, right? Like, this is an issue. There are noise complaints from this bank of rooms. Is there anything you can do to mitigate the noise issues?
Right? So you’re getting these operational insights that you had to work really hard to get before that might have been in a manual lock book, might have been transferred at the stand up meeting in the morning, but, you know, there was never any complete record of every PBX call that was coming in. Right? So it’s really interesting.
Sebastien Leitner
You make a case for replacing your voice, you know, call center with an AI.
Caryl Helsel
No, you augment it. I’m gonna go back. So, why should I have to pay a talented sales agent to answer when room service is open?
Why should I have to take my eyes away from the guest who is checking in to order towels for someone in another room? Right? So it is really about improving the guest experience. It’s about getting the answers to them correctly, because if you give AI the right answer, it always answers the same way. Humans don’t do that.
You know, so it’s looking at we’re augmenting this. We can’t hire enough people anyhow. Like, I mean, we worked with a resort that sadly was dropping fifty percent of their PBX calls because they couldn’t hire people to answer the phones. So there was no job replacement. It’s improving the guest experience, and it’s augmenting the people that they do have that need to check that, you know, it’s a very busy resort. They need to be paying attention to the guest that’s standing in front of them. And so this has enabled them to do that.
Sebastien Leitner
It is a loaded question, maybe inappropriate. I’m wondering if we’re afraid to talk on the phone anymore, right? Like, Are we texting more now these days? I don’t know.
Caryl Helsel
Well, texting AI can handle text, too. And if you’re texting to try to book, it can route to a human, right? So, I mean, again, there are just so many ways to use it in a positive way.
You know, I remember being at the SCIFT AI Forum last June, and I forget if it was the Marriott CEO or the Hilton CEO, but it was one of them. And his approach was like, I’m not gonna You know, if I can get five times the production out of an individual because now I have AI helping them do their job, you think I’m gonna cut people if I’m getting five times the effort out of them? No, I’m going to add some more people because I can get five times the work done and I can grow five times faster and I can, you know, all these things, right? So I think sometimes, again, like I said at the top, that we look at it the wrong way with a bit of a jaded lens. And I get that because it’s fear. I understand. But somehow we gotta take the fear out of it.
Sebastien Leitner
Where do you draw the line human touch point versus AI automation in hospitality? Where do you say should not be replaced by, I don’t know, Elon Musk’s robots? You know? Like, where where do you see that loss of hospitality per Yeah.
Caryl Helsel
Well, thankfully, my son went into ski operations, and I don’t think snow cats and ski patrol and lift maintenance people are going to be replaced by AI anytime soon. But I think we have to go back to we are the hospitality Hospitality is and I was taught this at a very young age. It’s that moment of truth when you’re eye to eye with somebody. Bill Kimpton and Tom Latoura Kimpton taught me that.
And that’s the moment of truth where hospitality comes alive. It’s when you’re welcoming into your living room, Bill Kempton used to say. That cannot die. Because if that dies, then hotels are nothing, in my opinion. Like, we are about delivering an experience, and AI is not gonna deliver that experience.
Each brand and each hotel type kind of draws their line in their own way. Some companies are saying, I will use AI in kind of the heart of the house for my team, but I never want it customer facing.
Others are saying, Hey, if I can provide better service by AI taking some things, and I can free my team up to focus more on the guest experience, then that’s what I want to do. Right? And so I think each company sort of has to decide what is our culture and what do we need to do.
I just, you know, one of the best hotels I ever stayed at is Pineapple Villas in Costa Rica, Uvita, Costa Rica, little tiny seven villa place.
AI is never gonna replace that. It was the most phenomenal experience, and and it was beautiful because the people yes. It was stunning resort, but the people are what made it special and what made it my favorite. And so I I just don’t see that part of our business being replaced by automation. It’s back to the basics, right?
What’s
Sebastien Leitner
What’s
Caryl Helsel
What’s
Sebastien Leitner
want to do a quick fire round with you.
Caryl Helsel
Giraffes or dragonflies? Can I say dragonflies? No.
Sebastien Leitner
Keep it tight. And then, you know, maybe wrapping up on, you know, the future, I guess, recruitment, you know, how do we get hospitality in general attractive again for the next generation? You’re very much involved in, you know, a lot of organizations that foster education. You’re part of the HSMI Foundation Board, Rising Leaders Initiative. I wanna talk a little bit about that.
Caryl Helsel
Okay. Yeah.
Sebastien Leitner
Sort of wrap us up. But before we go, a quick fire round. Okay.
A bad booking experience or bad check-in, which hurts more?
Caryl Helsel
Bad booking. Never get them in the door.
Sebastien Leitner
Pre arrival email or front desk upsell, which drives more revenue?
Caryl Helsel
Pre arrival email.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Guest calls instead of booking online? Missed opportunity or high value lead?
Caryl Helsel
High value lead.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. What is one thing that will disappear from a hotel room?
Caryl Helsel
One thing that will disappear from a hotel room.
I don’t know what to call what are the chords? Like, the different kind of The networking cords? The different cords for phone chargers and that kind of stuff.
Sebastien Leitner
They’re gonna disappear. Who wins the AI search race?
An OTA, a hotel chain, or an independent hotelier?
I’m sorry, and Google, I forgot the big one, the Google. Google, hotelier, brand, independent, or OTA?
Caryl Helsel
I really hope the independent hotelier does. It’s going to be a lot of work though.
Sebastien Leitner
Okay. Okay. Excellent. We’ve lost a lot of talent during COVID. I mean, I’m sure you’ve witnessed that.
A lot of, I guess, employees departed the industry as a whole and found better careers, or from their perspective, potentially better careers elsewhere. How do we make hospitality attractive again for the next generation?
Caryl Helsel
We need to tell our stories. I have had the most amazing career, and the most amazing opportunity to travel the world, to meet amazing cultures, beautiful people.
My best friends are in my industry because we’re hospitality people, and we make friends.
And I think we also need to communicate the message that the travel industry is about changing lives. It’s changing perspectives and mindsets.
Travel changes people, and it makes us better people. And we deliver the experiences that people remember for their lifetime, right? So we drive their memories because people remember where they traveled and how they felt when they were there.
So I think being sure that people understand the value of it is important. I am part of the HSNII Foundation, and giving to that organization is something that we can all do to ensure that there’s ongoing talent development at the university level, potentially even at the high school level. We’ve got some programs going on there. We have the rising leaders.
Two of them are employees here at Dragonfly, and they’re phenomenal. They’ve been trained extraordinarily well by HSMAI. And I think that, you know, being sure that we, who are more senior in our careers, that we are mentoring people and spending time with them. I have couple of people that I mentor on a regular basis and really developing that talent and being sure that I can transfer my knowledge because I’m not gonna be here forever, right?
So I wanna be sure to transfer the things that I know to someone else, to teach them, to train them, so that they can take it forward.
And so, you know, I think that a lot of people did leave after COVID. There were some people that were very hurt by our industry and how we handled some of the layoffs and furloughs, and was such a hard time, right? But I do believe that hospitality is one of the industries that’s going to still remain and not be completely taken over by automation. And so I think there’s opportunity for people to have really rewarding careers that are making a difference in our world.
And somehow, we, as the industry, need to get that message out. And I think, finally, one of the best ways is through all of our associations. I know you’re a huge part of HEDNA. I used to be HSMAI, HITECH, so HFTP.
All of those things are part AHLA. They’re part of developing the next generation, and they’re putting money into developing the next generation. And as hoteliers, we need to support those organizations so that they can continue to do that great work with universities and with the young talent in our industry.
Sebastien Leitner
That’s fantastic. I don’t think there’s any better answer than risks to wrap up our program today. Carol, thank you so much for joining, for sharing your thoughts, your insights, your experience.
Caryl Helsel
Thank you, Sebastian. It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Sebastien Leitner
I look forward to that too.
Thank care
Caryl Helsel
Thank care
Bye bye.
