More than half of hospitality executives (54%) responding to a new survey believe improving communication and collaboration across their workforce and with partners is important to achieving an enhanced guest experience. Respondents were asked what impacts, if any, they have achieved or believe they would achieve by improving communication and collaboration across their workforce and with partners. The second-most-cited impact was improved operational efficiency and cost management, at 42%.

Slack Technologies LLC, a Salesforce company, in collaboration with Studio ID’s Hotel Dive, conducted the survey of 150 hospitality executives. Survey results revealed that the guest experience and operational benefits of improving communication and collaboration dovetailed perfectly with respondents’ goals top strategic priorities: improving the guest experience (64%) and improving operational efficiency and cost management (40%). 

Similarly, more than half (53%) of respondents anticipate using AI in their organizations will bring improved operational efficiency and cost management, and 49% expect AI will enhance the guest experience.

“Hospitality is all about relationships,” says Jacqueline Nunley, travel & hospitality industry advisor for Salesforce. When employees have easy access to all the people and information to do their jobs, she says, they get “better, more efficient, can see issues and be proactive and solve them, because they’re using a communication tool that allows them to have visibility.” 

Key findings of the survey include:

• Communications challenges are widespread: Difficulties coordinating to ensure a seamless end-to-end guest experience are common to both office/knowledge and frontline/guest-facing positions (41% and 42%) in hotels and other hospitality organizations. Other top-rated challenges are cross-departmental communication barriers/information silos (39% and 35%) and ensuring key messages reach all workers (32% and 37%). 
• Communication/collaboration tools are fragmented: Respondents use an average 3.5 different communications or collaboration tools, including team collaboration and communication applications, productivity suites, and project management and task collaboration tools.
• Many hotel systems need better communication: Customer relationship management systems lead the list of hotel/hospitality organization systems respondents say are/would be enhanced by integrating additional or superior communication and collaboration capabilities (55%), followed by hotel/site management (45%) and task management (40%).
• Better communication broadly benefits employee experience. A substantial 81% of respondents say improving employee communication and/or collaboration would have a large or massive impact on employee productivity. More than three-quarters (76%) see massive or large impact on employee job satisfaction, while 70% say employee retention, another critical KPI, would see such impact. 
• Hotels welcome use of artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly two-thirds (62%) say their organizations are “very excited” about the use of artificial intelligence in their operations, envisioning a wide variety of use cases.

“AI can help hospitality organizations get ahead of guest expectations,” says Jack Gerhke, lead solution engineer for Slack. “You can use historical data and generative AI to make offers to that guest to surprise, delight and improve the loyalty of that guest with things like Slack,” such as a housekeeper accessing CRM data on a VIP guest, among other exciting use cases.

With guest expectations only increasing, the survey makes it clear that hoteliers and other hospitality organizations need new ways to work together, and are turning to advanced communications tools and artificial intelligence to make it happen.

Survey Methodology

Slack Technologies collaborated with Studio ID’s Hotel Dive to conduct the online survey in March and early April 2024, polling 150 respondents with owner/partner, c-level executive, VP/senior VP and director titles in a series of multiple-choice questions to understand their attitudes and actions around communication and collaboration practices and technologies, as well as use of AI. Respondents represented hotels/resorts (55%), online or brick-and-mortar travel agencies (18%), tour operators (13%), bus and coach transportation (10%) and a handful of additional hospitality verticals. Just under half (49%) of respondents work for organizations with $100 million to $499 million in revenue, with the next-largest group reporting revenue of $500 million to $1 billion (19%). Respondents were most likely to represent organizations with 501 to 1,000 employees (29%), 250-500 employees (25%), or 1,001 to 5,000 employees (23%).