How Wyndham scales AI to improve hospitality at 8,400 hotels 

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The business model for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts purposefully embraces sprawl. The hotel franchising company has about 8,400 hotels across six continents, comprising a portfolio of 25 brands, including Days Inn, La Quinta, and Ramada.

But the $450 million that Wyndham has spent on technology since 2018 favors standardization and fewer vendors. “We realized years ago that it was better for our franchisees if we created an overall technology bundle,” says Scott Strickland, Wyndham’s chief commercial officer. “We have buying power because we represent thousands of hotels that allow us to get things at a lower price.”

A former CIO at three organizations—Black & Decker, D&M Holdings, and Wyndham—Strickland became CCO in January 2024 to oversee all the traditional CIO responsibilities, including IT and cybersecurity, but also oversee revenue management decisions like pricing, marketing, and public relations.

He has been the central figure steering Wyndham’s decade-long technology overhaul that includes lifting and shifting to the cloud, hiring and building out a centralized data team, and mandating that all properties use a centralized reservation system built by Aven Hospitality, a software-as-a-service vendor that specializes in the hospitality sector. Strickland says that these infrastructure investments have also made it easier for Wyndham to deploy generative AI features.

To get feedback from Wyndham’s base of hotel property owners, Strickland formed a franchisee technology committee to learn more about their biggest technology and business priorities. They came back with a list of 72 requests, such as adding EV charging stations. Several concepts were consolidated and led to the creation of the AI-enabled guest engagement platform, Wyndham Connect, which uses AI to send proactive texts or respond to inbound guest questions, handle mobile check-ins, and allow staff to use AI-generated messaging to answer questions. 

“What it does for the guests is it removes friction from the entire journey,” says Strickland. 

Jason Hoehne, general manager of the 53-room AmericInn by Wyndham hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska, was among the pilot participants for Wyndham Connect. The hotel owner says he’s used the tool to upsell, speed up the check-in process, more efficiently track when guests depart and a room is ready for housekeeping, and add more layers of communication with guests, but led by AI. 

“We would never replace a front desk agent with a kiosk or device, that’s not my ownership style,” says Hoehne. “But it gives the staff tools to be more efficient and productive.”

He adds that the system both adds incremental revenue and boosts productivity. On the former, hotel owners can use the tool to upsell early check-ins or extended departures, while mobile-enabled digital tipping has led to an average tip of close to $10 for housekeepers. The latter can help incentivize staff to stay at Wyndham properties, lowering costly turnover rates.

Unlike other technology offerings from the corporate parent, Wyndham Connect and the AI functionality isn’t mandated. Still, the company said the tool has been embraced by over 5,000 hotels across North America and 100 properties internationally to handle 4.6 million mobile check-ins, $9 million in upselling, 12 million AI messaging engagements, and a 300-basis-points increase in direct booking for hotels using the AI voice functionality. 

More recently, Wyndham rolled out an AI feature that enables AI to handle calls to the front desk. Around 1,100 hotels are using that tool today.

On Wednesday, Wyndham also rolled out its newest travel app on ChatGPT, with the company claiming it is the first hotelier to have direct integrations with the three largest LLMs (Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude are the other two). Wyndham says it is embracing AI in this manner because conversational and visual travel discovery is migrating to these chatbots, with Strickland citing the scale of ChatGPT’s weekly user base of 900 million.

“It needs structured data to understand things about your hotel,” says Strickland. “It can get that data by scraping your website, but it can’t get everything it needs to execute a booking. We created an app that has all that data that it needs to help someone through that booking.”

For internal applications of AI, Strickland has leaned on existing vendors such as Google, Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce’s autonomous AI agents platform, Agentforce. “Go ahead and use the agent that’s closest to the data source,” says Strickland. “We are multimodal, and we’re also using OpenAI for our internal, large LLM. We’re going to look at every use case and apply the best one.”

As for employee training, Strickland says Wyndham offers courses and has leaned on vendors like Amazon and Atlassian.

Wyndham’s agentic AI deployments include allowing customers to book a room directly through an agent. For those who prefer to speak to a staff member, that option is still available, but also with AI in a less obvious way. Strickland says AI assists employees with the booking process, including sharing proactive information like if a caller is a loyalty member or perhaps complained about noise during their last stay and should be offered a quieter room. When used in this manner, AI can lead to better hospitality, Strickland says.

“If you’re the person that just wants the AI and goes straight to your room, we have it,” says Strickland. “If you want to talk to a front desk agent, we have it. But we’re going to make that engagement now even better than it used to be, with AI.”

John Kell

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com