Hotels have always collected more guest data than they put to use, spread across systems that were never designed to share information with one another. Rogerio Basso is principal at Impactum, a boutique investment bank and advisory platform that connects global capital with compelling hospitality and tourism opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rogerio has spent twenty-seven years in hospitality investment and development. Prior to Impactum, he led the tourism vertical at IDB Invest.
Vision Builders is a RapidCanvas video series featuring business leaders who are out in front on AI transformation. In this episode, we go deep inside hospitality and the value proposition for AI in this massive and diverse industry.
Rogerio has lived in eight countries and speaks four languages. His breadth of experience has shaped how he listens to clients and how he brings people from different cultures to the same table, a skill that counts for a lot in a business that runs on cross-border capital and guests from everywhere.
Interviewer Marcelo Vieira is Chief Business Officer at RapidCanvas, where he works with enterprise leaders to turn AI into measurable business results. He brings extensive experience consulting to brands within and beyond the hospitality space throughout the Americas.
These two experts sat down to discuss what AI can do for hotel operators and the people who finance them. Here’s a taste of what you’ll learn in this fast-paced video interview.
Where to start
A hotel group’s AI wish list can run from revenue forecasting to the nightly audit, and every item on it looks urgent from somebody’s desk. Picking the wrong first project can cost a year or more of wasted time before the technology delivers material value. The back office comes up often as the place to begin, largely because of what it holds: some of the biggest expense lines and the messiest records. Rogerio talks about the challenges that disconnected systems create in hotel management and how to choose where to start.
One guest, many properties
A guest takes a yoga class at a resort in one country. Three weeks later she checks into a sister property in another, and the front desk has no record of that earlier stay. Most hotel groups already hold the information to fix that. Getting it to the right property at the right moment, for thousands of guests at once, is a challenge tailor-made for AI. Marcelo calls it mass individualization: knowing thousands of guests the way a good host knows a handful of regulars. When a hotel group solves it, a whole portfolio of properties can deliver the kind of personalized experience guests expect from one attentive host, giving them a compelling reason to book their next stay inside the group.
Giving staff their time back
Labor is one of the largest expense lines in hospitality, and a big part of an employee’s shift goes to reports and administrative work that do nothing to enhance a guest’s visit. Every hour spent on back-office work is an hour that could go toward the guest experience, from the first moments in the lobby to room amenities, dining, and other services. When AI picks up that load, hotels can decide how to use the time they get back, creating real opportunities for an extraordinary guest experience. Rogerio discusses what this can mean for the level of service you deliver.
How investors interpret AI maturity
Hospitality valuations rest on margins, and back-office costs make up a large share of what limits EBITDA. A group that uses AI to take cost out of accounting, reporting, and the monthly close creates efficiency that lenders and equity partners look for and value. As AI becomes common in hotel operations, investors are beginning to treat it as a diligence consideration for how scalable a portfolio’s operating model is. Marcelo and Rogerio dig into how gains from AI can drive better terms for raising capital.
Why AI pilots stall
Plenty of executives and employees have built clever AI tools for themselves, but very few of those tools ever live beyond one person’s laptop. Marcelo calls this the AI enterprise gap. Prototypes are easy to build today, while enterprise-grade software a business can run on is still hard to get right. Software that serves an entire portfolio can transform operations at scale, and getting there takes strong governance and security from the start.
Build or partner?
Hoteliers know their guests and know how to run complex operations. Enterprise AI takes a different kind of expertise, and building it in-house means extensive hiring, a long timeline, and plenty of mistakes along the way. Rogerio shares his approach to where hotel groups should draw the line between what they build and what they hand to partners. He also talks about the trade-offs between moving quickly and taking a more cautious approach to development.
Watch the interview now to see what AI transformation can do for your organization.
