Choice Hotels and the AI Method

Choice Hotels and the AI method: what can an independent property learn from a 7,000-hotel chain?

If you work in a small independent hotel, you've probably felt a twinge of guilt reading the AI news coming out of the tourism industry. The big chains are launching platforms, hiring chief AI officers, signing partnerships with AWS, and there you are still wondering whether it's worth activating a chatbot on your website. The temptation is to think that AI is a game for those with budgets and dedicated teams, and that the rest of us just have to watch from the sidelines.

Then you read an interview like the one given by Anna Scozzafava, Chief Data, AI and Technology Officer at Choice Hotels, and you discover that the principles guiding a multinational with over 7,000 franchised hotels aren't actually that far from the ones we should all be reasoning with — just on a different scale.

The first thing that struck me is the sequence Choice chose. They didn't start with the end guest, but with their own internal staff, to understand real workflows before choosing the technology. Only after getting their own house in order did they move to the franchised hotel owners, and finally to the guest. It's the exact opposite of the instinct many of us have — we tend to start with a customer-facing tool because it's the most visible part and the easiest to talk about. Scozzafava says something that holds true for a two-hundred-room hotel just as much as for my twelve-room one: if the tool is too complex, nobody adopts it, and without adoption there's no value, no matter how sophisticated the technology underneath.

The second point is about the discipline of economic return. Scozzafava is explicit: if a tool doesn't increase the conversion rate or improve pricing decisions — metrics the owners are already tracking — they simply don't build it. In my consulting work I often see the opposite effect: properties buying AI software because it's the shiny new thing, without having first defined which concrete number it's supposed to move. It's a mistake that a small operation can afford even less than a big chain, because every euro invested in technology is a euro taken from something else, and the time to assess whether it worked is always less than you'd like.

The third point is the one I find most useful for those of us who, like me, also work on visibility in AI answer engines. When asked why Choice doesn't yet have its own AI search tool aimed at guests — unlike competitors such as Marriott — Scozzafava answers that you don't need to be first, you need to do it right, and that in the meantime the priority is making sure the data for their hotels is consistent and not fragmented, because that's what actually matters for appearing in AI-generated responses. This is exactly the work I've been doing for months on clients' websites and my own, and hearing it confirmed by someone who manages the data of thousands of properties tells me the direction is right: quality and consistency of information first, then the shiny tool.

Scozzafava's final reflection is perhaps the most important, and it's the one on which I build much of my training for operators: AI should be thought of as an amplifier of humanity, not a substitute. In a hotel like mine, where the value lies almost entirely in the relationship with the guest and in knowledge of the territory, this principle isn't a feel-good slogan — it's a survival condition for the brand.

The real lesson I take home from this interview isn't "do what Choice Hotels does." We don't have their budget, their teams, their technology partners. The real lesson is that the principles underpinning major AI transformations are sound management principles applicable at any scale: understand your internal workflows first, don't invest without a clear indicator to move, take care of your data before your tools, and never forget that technology serves people, not the other way around. On this, an independent property can compete on equal terms with anyone.

FAQ

Q: Do you need a big-chain budget to do AI in a hotel?

A: No. The principles that guide major chains' AI investments — such as ROI discipline and data quality — are applicable to a small property too, simply at a smaller scale.

Q: Where should an independent hotel start if it wants to use AI?

A: With its own internal workflows, not with a customer-facing tool. Understanding what happens internally before choosing the technology reduces waste and increases adoption.

Q: Why does data consistency matter for AI in tourism?

A: Because AI answer engines (such as search chatbots) rely on consistent, non-fragmented data to decide which properties to surface — so taking care of your property's online information is a prerequisite, not a technical detail.