By Alisha Goldberg - 6.26.2019
In a crowded field of next-generation hospitality technology innovation, SABA Hospitality won the People’s Choice Award in this year’s Entrepreneur 20X competition. The Hospitality Industry Technology Exhibition and Conference (HITEC) took place last week at the Minneapolis Convention Centre.
Selected by conference attendees, SABA Hospitality’s bespoke AI-based hospitality chatbot solution was chosen as the most popular and innovative hospitality technology solution for 2019.
The 2019 E20X competition featured presentations by eight competing solution providers. SABA Hospitality was recognized with one of the industry’s top innovation awards following a presentation by Byron Webster, the company’s co-founder, on SABA Hospitality’s bespoke hotel chatbot. Setting a new standard for breaking down language barriers and engaging guests in meaningful, personalized interactions were among the key features that scored them the People’s Choice award.
The E20X Award comes on the heels of SABA Hospitality’s recent expansion from Asia into both Europe and the Middle East. With language barriers continuing to provide accommodation providers of all persuasion the greatest challenge in modern travel, SABA Hospitality’s solution couldn’t be more timely.
The SABAGuest Request solution provides a complete 360-degree platform that centralizes communications throughout the entire guest journey. Using artificial intelligence-based technology, the solution automatically answers guests’ questions, takes requests, manages complaints, and makes recommendations. Additional features also allow guests to order all their food and beverage, make booking requests and view property specials and promotions. All functionality is accessible via the guests’ own mobile devices, without the need for any downloads.
The solution’s multilingual capabilities allow guests from all backgrounds to communicate with a hotel in their own native language, providing full personalization. This not only improves guest satisfaction but drives revenue. And with the ability to implement the solution across an entire group from a centralized environment, operators of any size can now deploy their very own chatbot across an entire portfolio, with total consistency, in less than a week.
The marketplace for hotel chatbox technology has been heating up with such contenders as Volara, which, in partnership with Alexa for Hospitality, provides platform agnostic voice-based conversation management software. Its software is designed to turn the major natural language processing platforms into a hotel business tool that drives more efficient guest service, influences guests’ behavior, improves net promoter scores and helps hoteliers understand their guests better. Last year, Google unveiled its Duplex technology, which also holds a lot of promise in the hospitality space.
SABA Hospitality will no doubt help this nascent opportunity arena continue to evolve with its own AI-based hospitality chatbot solution, which last week won over HITEC attendees in a big way.