Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #289: Helping Hotels Fight Predatory OTA's | with Tim Major
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #289: Helping Hotels Fight Predatory OTA's | with Tim Major === David Millili: Welcome to a special HITEC Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Please make sure to follow, like, subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Excited about today, we have on Tim Major, CEO of Operto. Welcome to the show, Tim. How we doing? Yeah. Tim Major: Thanks, guys. Good morning. Morning. Steve Carran: So Tim, to start off, for those that are unfamiliar with Operto One, what problems are you solving for hotels, and why is now the right time for AI-powered operations platform? Tim Major: Yeah. Thanks for... That's a good question. Operto One really was born out of the idea that we really saw an opportunity with AI to tackle direct bookings in a different way. I mean, direct bookings has been the age-old holy grail for independent hoteliers and all hoteliers, and so AI really changes the way you tackle this. I mean, in particular, we focus on what we were really launching here right now was tackling something called predatory OTAs. Mm. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but the category is basically you have your normal OTAs, which is like Booking.com and Expedia, and then you have this other group of OTAs like Reservation.com, Guest Reservations. Yeah, it's funny, everyone smiles once I start saying the names 'cause everyone has a personal experience of seeing how they book on that by accident. And so our technology is really able to remove them from the direct booking experience for hotels in ways that you couldn't do before. David Millili: So Operto One talks about autonomous AI teammates. Tim Major: Mm-hmm. David Millili: How do you define that concept, and what task are hotels successfully handling off to, handing off to AI today? Tim Major: Mm-hmm. How I think about this is most of us are used to working with software where you log in and you have tasks to do, and the tasks you're going to achieve with that software are gonna get you to an outcome. Autonomous agentic AI is focused on actual outcomes. So when we're building software, we're actually building backwards from the completion of the outcome that you want for your hotel. So in the case of if you think about your organization, it's a lot more akin to hiring staff, where you'd have a job description with roles and responsibilities. Well, how I think about it is that some of those responsibilities that you have for those staff will now just come off of those roles and move on to an AI agent. And you just won't do things that you did in the past. AI will do it for you. Steve Carran: That's great. And most hotels have a PMS, multiple technology partners, some sites, sometimes siloed technology, which we talk about a lot. How does Operto One fit into the existing tech stack without creating additional complexity? Tim Major: Yeah, that's a good question. Biggest thing we're focused on is simplicity. No more screens. We wanna free up hotels to be focused on their guests, so we're layering on top of preexisting tech stacks. We have no restrictions with what PMS you're running, what RMS you're running, what CRS you're running. It really doesn't matter. We interface to all of them, but in a lot of cases, agentic AI can actually complete tasks without some of that data. It's able to gather it from other places. And so it really runs on top. Steve Carran: That's great. David Millili: Okay. So one of your key value propositions is protecting direct bookings from OTAs. We were just talking about that a little bit. How does AI help hotels capture and convert more direct booking opportunities? Tim Major: Fundamentally, what we're focused on is if you look at the search results screen, you're basically being found in two places. You're either being found in what's remaining of the search results screen on Google, or you're now needing to be found in the LLMs. Those are really the two key places. So we've really focused on that problem. And if you look at the top of your search results, you basically have mostly sponsored ads and meta listings. And so we're really focused on ensuring that your brand name is showing up on that part of the screen because we know that's where the majority of the traffic is coming from and the majority of the conversions are coming from. So our AI agents are actually helping actively come up with solutions and come back to you with ideas. And then all you do, the human-in-the-loop component, is it'll ask you, "We found X, Y, and Z problem. We wanna do A, B, C. Do you approve?" And you approve it, it goes and actions it, and it comes back to you with results. And it keeps doing that. It has a heartbeat, so it doesn't shut off. You don't have to actually go and log in and ask it questions. It'll come back to you and say, "I saw something," and it'll be a Tuesday, and it'll go, "Can you give me a couple days? I'm gonna work on it." And by Friday, it'll come back, and it'll actually change and execute things that help you get better position on those pages. David Millili: So a lot of hoteliers are worried that AI could replace the human element, the human touch. Tim Major: Yeah. David Millili: So where do you see the balance between automation and authentic guest service? Tim Major: I think one of the important things that we're focused on is we don't want to get between the guest and the service you provide. I think it depends on every hotel, like what is the ideal experience? I think technology can play a role in that, but our goal right now is to really focus on a lot of the complex, data-intensive back-office tasks, especially on the marketing, top-of-funnel side. So we don't really see this as a replacement at all. We see it as more of an augmentation or an assistant. I think it's also an important way to start with AI. I think it can be challenging because a lot of these AI agents need to learn about your hotel. They need to learn context before they get accurate. Starting on the guest-facing side can be a fairly high-risk place to start, but starting on the top-of-funnel marketing, direct booking, really attacking these predatory OTAs, it's an easy place to start and it's also a very data-intensive part and the speed at which it changes is difficult for a human to actually manage themselves. So it's a natural place to start. So we really see this as augmenting and adding to the team, not replacing. Steve Carran: So can you share a real-world example of a hotel that implemented Operto One and the measurable impact it had? Tim Major: We have a hotel up in Canada actually that is a resort hotel in a major resort-area ski town, and they were struggling a lot with these predatory OTAs. They had customers coming to them saying, "I booked with you. The price is higher than what I saw. What's the deal with that? I want a discount. I saw it cheaper there." And they kept saying, "Well, you didn't actually book with us. It came through the Expedia network. We can't do anything about this. This is an OTA booking." And that's when they realized that it was these predatory OTAs, reservation.com and hotelsone.com, that were doing this. Or, for example, the customer will show up and there's no room at the hotel. So they found that they were having these negative guest experiences, and as soon as our agents started to run, it took about a week to remove some of these predators or push them out of position. And as soon as that happened, they saw some of their direct bookings go up. They still saw their OTA, Expedia and Booking.com reservations coming in, but those were matching their cancellation policies. Those were matching their rates, so they didn't have guest problems there. So this was the big change for them. They were like a boutique resort and they just really cared about these experiences, and they had recurring customers. And they realized that this was a significant change that just mattered a lot to them. David Millili: So looking ahead three to five years, how do you see AI reshaping hotel operations and what role do you expect Operto One to play in that evolution? Tim Major: Yeah, that's a great question. Three to five years, I can't do three to five years. I know. But I could do a year potentially. Things are moving faster than I've ever seen them. A lot of fun. I think the biggest thing that we're gonna continue to look at and focus on is we have a group of agentic agents. I focus more on the marketing side, but we're gonna continue looking at outcomes and working backwards. So we're not trying to create work for hotels. We're not trying to replace staff, but we are trying to free up time so you can focus on either guest experiences or whatever is deemed more high value for your brand. So it's more like repositioning your staff. So we're gonna remain focused on that simplicity. We use the word magic a lot internally, really creating easy, authentic experiences where, when you're working with the agent, it won't feel like you're working with a general agent. It's very context-driven by your hotel's data, the structured data in our system. And so that's our goal, to really continue to build that hotel-specific context and work towards outcomes. Steve Carran: So how is Operto positioning themselves in GEO search? Tim Major: Yeah, as I was mentioning earlier, we really are focusing on where does a hotel get found now, in the search results and in the LLMs? And so again, focusing on outcomes, we really wanted to make something easy. We saw a lot of the tools that are out there now where you're putting in key phrases, and you're getting a lot of analysis, and you're getting a lot of reports, but it's not necessarily showing how to do it. So one of the things that our agent will do is, because it has this heartbeat, after it's worked on key things like predatory OTAs or getting them removed, it'll come back with more ideas. And one of the things it'll do is it'll start to craft what is your ideal guest profile, and it'll suggest a couple different options. Then there's human-in-the-loop input, so you can refine that. But then what it'll do is it'll make suggestions about how to be positioned in GEO and what content you need to change on your website. That's the big thing. A lot of the content is not structured now on websites to really be conducive to being found in LLMs when people are searching and doing their travel lookups. So what our system will do is it'll actually come back with those recommendations, and then if you approve it, it'll go and make changes to your website directly without the hotel having to do any work to increase your position in LLMs. And so we found that to be really effective. That's one of the main things that I think is going to be important going forward. Again, we don't want to add work for hoteliers. We're just going to create the outcome, and it's just going to happen. David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let people know how they can get in touch with you and find out more about Operto. Tim Major: Great. Great. Yeah. Come and check us out at operto.com. You can find all the information on all our agents there, and dig into some of the articles we have and the ROI calculator that will let you see what our agent will do and the type of return you can expect. David Millili: Well, that does it for this special HITEC Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thank you.