Hospitality/travel industry commercial platform Lighthouse has debuted an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution.
Channel Manager, announced Thursday (July 18), is designed to erase what the company calls "long-standing limitations" of static pricing, promotion and distribution technologies.
"Independent hotel owners, general managers and sales leaders have traditionally relied on separate pricing, promotional and channel management tools that lack connectivity and require manual monitoring," Lighthouse said in a news release.
"These legacy processes and tools are slow, time-consuming, and insufficient to deal with the rapidly changing needs of independent hoteliers."
Lighthouse, the release said, automates market demand analysis, competitor pricing, on-the-books reservations, and optimal channel distribution to serve as a revenue "co-pilot" for independent hoteliers.
By integrating pricing, promotion and distribution capabilities into one platform, these hoteliers can save time, make better pricing decisions, and automate the process of sending prices and promotional programs to the most desirable online travel agencies and other channels.
The company says its solutions "are designed to break down silos and unify all aspects of pricing, promotion and distribution management under one intelligent, connected platform," to help independent hoteliers respond swiftly to market changes, capitalize on emerging trends, and ultimately drive higher occupancy, revenue and profitability.
Lighthouse's new offering comes as the travel sector is adding AI tools, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.
For example, Kayak had just launched PriceCheck, which lets users can upload a screenshot of any flight itinerary directly into the Kayak app to find more competitive prices, and Ask Kayak, a chat function on the search results page, which allows users to input specific preferences for hotels, cars or flights.
And last year, Tripadvisor launched a feature that uses AI to develop personalized travel itineraries based on its collection of over a billion user reviews.
"AI cannot replace the knowledge and experience of a travel agent or an accommodation provider," Karen Yeates, the executive vice president of information technologies at Signature Travel, a cooperative of travel agencies, told PYMNTS in an interview. "However, AI technologies can improve the flow of business by enabling travel experts to make supremely data-driven decisions and offer better services."
For example, she added, agencies collect a large amount of data about locations of choice and generalized traveler behavior.
AI can comb through these trends to come up in-depth insights about the travel outlook for upcoming seasons, letting agents make better suggestions to their clients.
