Growing Hilton In APAC: Deploying AI, Innovating The App And Enhancing “The Stay”
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.
“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.”
