AI in Hospitality: The Moments Your Venue Will Be Judged On

When a venue hands routine guest tasks to AI, its people become more important, not less. Every booking confirmation, wait-time update and opening-hours answer a chatbot takes over is one less chance for your team to make an impression. The handful of human moments left over will decide how your guests and members judge you.

Most of the AI conversations happening in clubs and hotels right now start with what can be automated and what it will save. Those are fair questions for any business. For a hospitality business, they skip the more important one, which is what your venue will be standing on once the automation is in place.

What happens when AI holds the plan but can’t build anything?

For more than 30 years, I’ve used Lego in my frontline and leadership training workshops. One person holds the instruction booklet and can see the finished model but isn’t allowed to touch a single piece. A second person holds the pieces and can only hand them over when asked, without ever seeing the booklet. A third does the building, with no booklet and no direct access to the pile. The model only gets built if those three people talk to each other, which is exactly why I use it. It highlights how a team really communicates.

I’ve started to see AI in hospitality in the same way. Your booking system, CRM and chatbot are the person with the booklet. They can know a member’s birthday, their usual table, how long since their last visit and which rewards are about to expire. They can’t pour the drink, read the room or fix a mistake at the bar. Your frontline team is the builder. If what the system knows never reaches the person standing in front of the guest, the experience doesn’t get built, however clever the technology is.

Customer experience strategist James McIntyre, who joined me on the podcast recently, draws the line where I would. AI can own anything predictable with a predictable answer, while people keep service recovery, the moments that matter and anything ambiguous. What I’d add from the training room is that those are precisely the situations an underprepared team finds hardest. The routine exchanges AI is taking over were also where new staff found their feet.

Why do long-term members stop feeling valued?

Long-term members stop feeling valued when a business treats knowing them as a marketing task rather than a service standard.

I’ve had my business for 33 years and I’ve been with the same telco for every one of them. In all that time I’ve received nil loyalty from them; no discounts, no special offers. Yet a brand-new customer who signs up tomorrow will be offered a special deal on their first day. The company has three decades of data on me, and it has never once used any of it to make me feel like the customer it already has.

The same pattern shows up in the messages businesses send. I’ve lost count of the emails from places that asked for my email address at the counter and then started sending offers with nothing to do with anything I’ve bought. I’ve also had the “we’ve missed you” message from a business I hadn’t heard from in years, for a product I couldn’t even remember. Each of those messages proved the business had my details. None of them proved it knew anything about me.

AI is about to make this problem bigger before it makes it better, because the cost of sending a generic message is falling close to zero. James estimates the average Australian already belongs to between eight and eleven loyalty programs. When every program can send more messages for less effort, the only ones that cut through are those that clearly come from someone who knows the member.

This matters even more in a registered club, where your longest-standing members aren’t customers you’re trying to keep. They own the place. A member who has held a card for 20 years and still gets the same blanket promotion as someone who joined last week has every reason to wonder what their membership means.

What skills will frontline teams need when AI handles the routine?

Frontline teams will need to be strong at recognition, recovery and judgement, because those are the moments left when the routine is automated.

Recognition means using what the venue already knows. Greet the member by name, mention the reward they’re about to lose, or remember that they were in last week celebrating something. Recovery means turning a disappointed guest around in the moment, without passing them on or waiting for a manager. Judgement covers everything that doesn’t come with a script, which in hospitality is most of what makes a visit memorable.

All three can be trained, but none of them can be learned from an induction video. They’re built through practice, coaching on shift, and managers who model them every day. A venue that adds AI without investing in those skills has moved its weak points somewhere guests are more likely to notice them.

Who carries the risk when the technology gets it wrong?

Middle managers carry it, whether or not anyone planned it that way. Boards and executive teams sign off on the technology. The duty manager on a Saturday night is the one standing in front of the guest who was promised something the venue can’t deliver.

James describes this as promise governance: every commitment an AI tool makes about your venue needs the same guardrails as a commitment made by a staff member. I agree, and I’d put the emphasis on who has the authority to make it right. If your duty managers have to ring someone before they can fix a broken promise, your structure turns a small technology error into a bigger service failure.

What should leaders check before investing in AI for guest service?

Before you invest, check whether your people are ready for the moments AI will leave them.

Read the last three messages your venue sent to members, and ask whether a member of 20 years would feel recognised by any of them. Watch how your team handles a complaint on a busy night. Ask your duty managers what they’re allowed to fix without calling someone. Those three checks will tell you more about how AI will land in your venue than any software demonstration.

I explored where AI belongs in the guest journey with James McIntyre on The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast this week, and you can listen to the full conversation here: https://www.michellepascoe.com/The-Michelle-Pascoe-Hospitality-Podcast

If your venue is preparing for the moments AI can’t handle, my Customer Excellence and Engagement Programs, the Middle Management Movement and Mystery Shopping Business Insight Reports work together to build that capability, from the frontline to the leadership team. You can learn more here: https://www.michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms