By Larry and Adam Mogelonsky - 1.23.2025
It’s inevitable that modern advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will impact the hotel industry. While much has been rightfully said about use cases like machine learning (ML) impacting personalized guest offers or microsegmentation and generative AI (genAI) helping with contextual marketing or summarization for staff, for this focused article let’s shift gears from the rooms division into the spa and wellness facilities.
While this may not apply for every hotel brand, it’s worth mentioning that ‘health and wellness’ has a huge CAGR across a variety of product categories. The phrase we use to put the proverbial gun to hotel owners’ heads so that they understand the need for wellness strategy is, “As someone does at home, they will soon expect at their chosen accommodations.” No matter your brand or star rating, if you aren’t thinking about incorporating wellness features – spa-specific, healthy F&B or in the guestroom – then you risk brand and rate commoditization, leading to growth stagnation.
So, let’s consider where AI and the latest longevity technologies will impact the spa, knowing that the megatrend overall is for travelers in all segments increasingly looking to stay healthy while abroad. When it comes to the prospects of labor replacement brought about by AI, the going phrase to define our thoughts on this evolution is ‘technology-adjacent therapies’ where many posit that practitioners will come to use an increasing number of advanced tools to guide their treatments rather than outright labor supplantation by robots or AI-driven software. The nuanced word to pick out from this term is ‘adjacent’ which stands in contrast to other professions and industries where AI technologies are already being positioned as ‘centric’.
No matter the technological advances, the heart of any hospitality, spa or wellness experience is the person-to-person interaction – for instance, between the guest and an registered massage therapist (RMT), between the guest and the spa receptionist, or amongst a group of friends who visit together for a social afternoon – and that will be very difficult to supplant.
Consider an example from a cutting-edge ultraluxury Hawaiian hotel, Sensei Lanai, a Four Seasons Resort. This property’s Thermal Body Mapping and Massage uses proprietary sensors to detect sources of bodily tension for the therapist to then interpret during the treatment. Priced at $750 for 2.5 hours, it’s definitely high-tech, but the core reason for why it’s so beloved by guests will always be the practitioner’s dedication to personalized care. Following this principle, it stands that the greatest overall impact from various forms of AI in the near-term for hotel wellness programs will not be futuristic guest experiences like the aforementioned body-scanning-augmented massage, except at the ultraluxury resort, luxury health clinic or medical tourism categories.
Rather, these new tools can help practitioners reduce the amount of administrative busywork and repetitive tasks that the job requires so that they can devote even more time to delivering exceptional experiences for their clients or patients. And this is the timeless principle throughout all operations: AI is here to help make teams increasingly more guest-facing and not bogged down by the demotivating slog that describes many of the minute-by-minute tasks that hotel teams currently face.
From the technologist’s point of view, the spa therapists, practitioners, masseuses, clinicians, healers and receptionists all represent ‘end users’ for their products. If the end user’s experience with the technology is cumbersome or lacking in automation, these frustrations or inefficiencies will inevitably reflect onto the guest in the form of disorganized scheduling, inconvenient booking processes or fatigued staff. We emphasize this now because so many of our younger or newer associates entering the industry have higher expectations for this line of work insofar as automation. Too much busywork will directly lead to increased turnover in the spa or otherwise.
And this is something that not many tech vendors have considered until recently with the user interfaces that they’ve designed: you seldom find spa practitioner, an ‘end user’, who is also a techie. That’s not why they’ve pursued this profession. Hence, any way that the hotel IT and commercial teams can liberate their time away from dealing with the intricacies of data systems will be immensely appreciated and a worthy morale booster. Ultimately, like all other customer-facing operations in hospitality, it’s not just about the guest journey but the staff journey wherein focusing on making the latter’s experience smooth and seamless will cast a positive halo on the guest experience.
Understanding that AI is more of a workhorse than a show horse, it’s now time to unpack what exactly is meant by this two-letter acronym. Namely, AI represents a myriad of tools that can be deployed iteratively to attain operational improvements to all stages of the guest journey, from better merchandising of experiences at the booking or prearrival phases through to onsite facility management and post-stay loyalty.
Without delving into a full lesson of how ML, large language models (LLMs) or now small language models (SLMs) work, here are a few of the flavors within this AI landscape that may soon come to help, typically accompanied by their own acronyms just to make the process that much more fun:
- Generative AI (genAI) and generative pretrained transformers (GPTs): These are the tools built on LLMs or filtered LLMs/SLMs (read: retrieval-augmented generation or RAG) that have been receiving much of the hype over the past two years wherein deep learning is performed on massive data sets (like all of Twitter) to understand the context of language. An easy use case for spas would be ‘summarization’ wherein a genAI tool might read through the totality of information known about a guest and produce the top three immediately actionable insights for the receptionist or practitioner.
- Customer data platforms (CDPs): As fueled by an underlying engine of AI-driven automation and middleware tools, these software systems are emerging a now-critical element in the hotel tech architecture because of their ability to pipe in data from all the various storehouses of a guest’s data then merge all of it together for a more complete profile on the guest’s preferences as well as for highly segmented marketing. For instance, one of the key features within a CDP is identity resolution (either as ‘match and merge’ or ‘deduplication’) where the system can find multiple and partial profiles for the same guest then confidently amalgamate them for hotel teams to see the full picture that can better inform upcoming wellness experience suggestions.
- Multivariate (A/B) testing: This well-honed application of ML works by presenting users – staff or guests – with different options around a single variable, then using the observed actions to create accurate business models. As a merchandizing example, upselling platforms can send out a spa newsletter to incoming guests two days out from arrival or one week out, and then measure which of these two resulted in more bookings to better decide future promotional efforts. Any variable can be tested like this to get feedback on user behavior in order to optimize performance – time of day, type of offer, which offers are placed in the first position, the messaging of certain offers and so on.
Ultimately, these sorts of tools act as the glue for ever-better guest experiences by making teams highly informed and hyper-efficient. It isn’t all roses, though, as any technology, AI or otherwise, requires a ton of work to set up and onboard wellness teams on best practices. Still, the advantages far out way the pain of change. Just don’t forget that no matter how crazy the world gets with how we use AI (or it uses us), hospitality – and within that broader bucket, spa and wellness – will remain wholly dependent on personalized care.
Together, Adam and Larry Mogelonsky are the principals at Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd., an asset management and hotel development consultancy. Their experience encompasses properties around the world, both branded and independent in the luxury and boutique categories. Their writing includes eight books: “Total Hotel Mogel” (2024), “In Vino Veritas: A Guide for Hoteliers and Restaurateurs to Sell More Wine” (2022), “More Hotel Mogel” (2020), “The Hotel Mogel” (2018), “The Llama is Inn” (2017), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “Llamas Rule” (2013) and “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012). You can reach them at [email protected] to discuss business challenges or for speaking engagements.
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