Amadeus Travel Tech Talk
In this podcast, we engage in conversations with our leaders, customers and industry experts to discuss the latest trends and developments in the travel technology industry.
Amadeus Travel Tech Talk
Transforming Hospitality with AI: Insights from Hivr.ai and Amadeus Ventures
Transforming Hospitality with AI: Insights from Hivr.ai and Amadeus Ventures
In this episode of the Travel Tech series, we are discussing with Suzanna Chiu, Head of Amadeus Ventures and Felix Undeutsch, CEO and co-founder of Hivr. about the continuous transformation of the travel industry, Hivr's mission to automate manual processes in hotels, and the strategic investment by Amadeus Ventures.
Tune in to this episode to understand:
- How Hivr is transforming the hospitality industry with AI
- What Amadeus Ventures looks for when making strategic investments
Speakers:
- Suzanna Chiu, Head of Amadeus Ventures
- Felix Undeutsch, CEO and co-founder Hivr
What can we expect in this next exciting chapter of our industry? Tune in to find out.
To stay up to date on the latest news from Amadeus, and to catch the next episodes in our series, check out the Resource section on our website or follow us on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Amadeus Travel Tech Talk podcast. I'm Anna Burton and I'll be your host today as we look at the continuous transformation of an industry that never really does stand still. In today's episode, you'll hear these themes in action as we explore how AI is reinventing hotel operations and why the meetings and groups business is ripe for reinvention. Our guest today, Felix Umdeutsch, CEO and co-founder of Hiver. Hiver being a fast-selling AI-powered platform that is revolutionizing how hotels and venues handle meetings and group businesses. Felix, hi, good morning.
Felix:Hi, Anna, good morning.
Ana:Hi. And with me today also is Susanna Chiu, who heads up the Amadeus Ventures Department. Susanna has been leading this program since its early days and has successfully expanded the program from its infancy into an integral part of the business, driving strategic value both for the corporation and for the portfolio companies. Hi, Susanna. Welcome. Hi. Okay, great. Super. So let's get started. Felix, could you tell us a little bit about your transformative story and the journey with Hiver?
Felix:Yeah, so when we talk about inspiration, I think there are probably two components here. So the one is the one side are kind of my personal traits and my personal background. And the other side is more like the business context and the business environment I've been in. So let's quickly start with the personal traits and personal background. So I have been growing up in former East Germany, GDR, and there was basically, yeah, a scarcity of pretty much everything. So we had to basically demonstrate a high level of resilience. We had to deal with change coming at us every day. Like every day there was something new happening. So there was a high degree of the necessity to build resilience. That's the one side. And I think it helped me a lot when when we think about startups and founding a company, having this resilience and dealing with change on a daily basis. So that's the one side. And the business side is so I have been working at Expedia from 2011 to 2018. And I have been at the end of my stint, I have been heading up the meetings and groups department. So we try to automate meetings and group bookings in hotels. And what I realized is that there is a massive pain around manual processes in regards to bookings and meeting space, grouping, accommodation. And so I thought with a couple of other Expedia people, let's found a company that actually solves that problem, like addressing the manual processes in hotels when it comes to meeting space and group bookings. And that is what Hyber is all about. It's about automating manual processes in hotels.
Ana:Wow, Felix, sounds like an incredible story of growth and transformation, both professionally and personally. And if we were to come back to Hyber, I already gave a intro at the beginning. But could you sum it up for us in three words? What would those three words be?
Felix:Yeah, so three words. Number one, it's all around automation. So we are automating very unstructured processes. And you might think of automation like workflow automation, step by step by step, rule-based automation. But what we are doing is we are automating very unstructured processes, like as an example, email communication, phone communication, like these things are extremely unstructured. So first keyword is probably automation. The second keyword is speed. So we do everything we do, we do very fast. So but this is both in regards to our application so that our hotels and hotel customers are actually able to speed up their processes, but also internally, we are optimizing for speed. So everything we do, we do because we do in a way that we are able to do it extremely fast. So we are optimizing our processes, our technologies, our applications in a way that we are our organization in a way that we are extremely fast. And you also realize I'm speaking relatively fast. And the last thing that comes to my mind is fun. So for us, Hiver is kind of a playground where we can disrupt and challenge status quo of how things are done. But at the same time, when I extend this to our customers, I mean, we are automating tedious admin work and processes and nobody has fun with that in the hotel world. So we are probably bringing back a little bit the fun to the convention sales agents in hotels and allowing them to focus on the stuff that matters and adds value to them. So the last word, the third word is kind of fun and playground, essentially. Yeah.
Ana:Great. Thank you. Interesting. Susanna, coming to you. So I introduced you as leading the Amadeus Ventures team. So within Amadeus Ventures, you obviously look for partners like Hiver. What stood out for you from Hiver? What made this an interesting investment opportunity for Amadeus?
Suzanna:Sure, Anna. So we're very happy to have done this investment into Hiver. To start with why Hiver, let's also talk about what we look for in general for investments. So we are a startup investment program and we are purely strategic. What does that mean? That means that for ventures, we only invest in startups when we can find an opportunity to add value. And in this case, we look for startups who already have a working product that we believe can be scalable across the world. We look for exceptional people, people who understand the problems and also are passionate about bringing a solution to that problem, combining the vision with execution. And these are very important things. This is what we look for, for startup collaborations and investment. Coming back specifically to the case of Hiver, we see a very, very good alignment between what Hiver is doing and Amadeus' vision to lead the travel industry's digital transformation. Felix managed not to mention too much about AI when he chose those three words. So we see a very, very good ability to be able to apply AI in a predictive sense, AI in a generative sense, to be able to make sense of these unstructured information and be able to bring value to hoteliers, which is one of the important customer segments for Amadeus, bringing them high value business opportunities. So to say in this case, we see this alignment of key priorities between Amadeus, the industry, and what Hiver is doing. In addition, Hiver is agile, they are collaborative, and they are committed to the innovations and the speed that Felix and teams are bringing to our customers. So working together, we are hoping that we will be able to continue to be leading technology partners for our customers and bring new ideas and new value propositions faster to our industry.
Ana:Thanks, Susanna. And so, I mean, I guess listening to you, I'm thinking also I understand the value that Hiver brings to Amadeus and the importance, the scalability of it. But from Felix, I was just thinking about you, I guess for you, raising funds from corporate investors must be quite tricky, must be exciting, but tricky. What advice would you give other startups that are navigating those waters? What was your, I guess, what was your perspective on this whole thing?
Felix:So I think, I mean, as a startup, you always have various options to raise funds, right? So the strategic route, so basically raising funds from a strategic investor like Amadeus is a very different route versus raising funds from institutional investors. So that's clear. And the advice here is, if you're going to a strategic investor, like Amadeus Venture Programs, it's like you need to find the overlap and where you can drive synergies and where you have an alignment of interests. So there's no point on, from my perspective, I'm purely talking from my experience. And I think there are probably many different experiences and opinions. But from my opinion is, if you talk to a strategic investor, you need to make sure that you add value to that company. So where can you drive business impact, where can you essentially augment maybe their existing products? Where can you fill a gap that that strategic investor might have and drive value? And this is very different versus raising funds from a venture capitalist, from an institutional investor, where it's, I'm not saying that there is no discussion around how a VC can add incremental value beyond the money. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. But for a strategic investor, it is obviously a magnitude larger. But it's really around how can the business on the one side and the funding requirements on the other side, how can they be brought both together? So that's really the key question. And ideally, when you go for my experience and advice, I think it's really around before you talk to a strategic investor, you need to be clear of how your product, how your company fits within the overall picture. And if you don't have an understanding, then there is no point in talking, I guess. So that's my personal opinion about it.
Ana:And while I have you, because I'm thinking also about a previous answer where she said that you managed to not describe, not to mention AI in the three words that I asked you to describe Hyver in. But I think AI is clearly central to Hyver's value proposition, right? Can you break down how it powers your solution and what makes it unique in the market?
Felix:Yes. So maybe a quick one, why I didn't mention AI. So fundamentally, I don't care about AI. So we are working for an AI or an AI company, AI startup, right? But fundamentally, I don't care about AI, because AI is just essentially a technology. And I don't care so much about the solution and capabilities. What I do care about is, am I able to drive business impact for my customers? And am I able to solve a problem? And that might be through AI, that might be through robotic process automation, which doesn't have a lot to do with AI. That might be through whatever, you know, I don't really care about it. What I care about is driving business impact. So now, what are the problems that we are seeing at hotels for when it comes to meetings and groups? So number one is, they're overwhelmed by emails, they're overwhelmed by requests for proposals. So whomever is not so close into the meeting and group space, meetings and groups drive like one third of the room nights globally. But the process is extremely manual. That process is like a request for proposal process. There's no booking process. So what we are doing with AI is essentially we are automating email exchange. And email, again, is like totally unstructured. It's like totally unstructured data. We are able to extract information from emails, we are able to classify emails with AI, we are able to craft responses to emails, we are able to extract information from emails, like certain data points and pump them into the hotel's systems. We are able to also automate not just text, but also voice. So give you an example, there might be an email coming in for a hotel and the meeting planners asking, hey, I'd like to book a meeting. And there are certain information missing. As an example, pre arrivals are missing, something like what you're oftentimes seeing, actually, a customer sending an email to a hotel chain and forgets to mention the destination, like where would you like to have a meeting? London, Paris, Manchester, Berlin. So what we're doing there is with AI, we're actually able to automate the follow up call, like rather than somebody in the hotel calling the meeting planner saying, hey, thanks a lot for your email. Unfortunately, we don't know where you want to stay, didn't mention that. Within five seconds after the email is received, an AI is calling the customer saying like, hey, thanks a lot for your email, this and this and this is missing, we would like to send you a proposal instantly. But we need that information, like how many pre arrivals, where would you actually like to meet? So these are kind of the things we are doing with AI. So we are automating unstructured processes in regards to emails, in regards to voice, availability checks, price calculations for meetings and events. These are kind of the functional areas we are playing in.
Ana:And I mean, you say you don't care about AI, but AI is revolutionizing everything, I think, all of our interactions. So besides what you're doing now with AI, looking ahead, what do you see as the most transformational opportunities for AI in the hospitality sector specifically?
Felix:Yeah, so when I say I don't care about AI, I think you get the point, right? It's like I'm trying to be a little bit controversial, what I'm trying to say is like, so actually giving you an example, like years ago, like Five, six years ago, there was a massive hype around blockchain, you know, like this technology and amazing blockchain, decentralized ledgers. And for a long time, actually, the question was, okay, what's the problem you're trying to solve? And so that's why I mean, like, I don't care about the technology, I'm more care about the business impact we can generate and the technology and the solutions come second. So in regards to hospitality, and where I see the biggest opportunities. So what I see is that I have struggled imagining a world where when we think about hotels and hospitality is where any back end process of where it's around matching data, providing data, calculating things, entering data somewhere, I really have a tough time seeing that this would be something that humans do in future. So I even have a tough time thinking about like, why would a hotel, to a certain extent need systems in the first place, like, as an example, a property management system where a human goes in to check certain data for check in, check out, where rooms are occupied. So because if everything at one point is done with an AI that can enter data, read data, compose data in a new way, match data, why do we need user interfaces? So a lot, I think what will happen is that and this is not just hospitality, that managers and leaders will start not just to manage humans that are really there for driving guest interaction, they actually will also need to start to manage AI agents that do a lot of the, let's say, operational back office tasks. And we will need to find ways to govern these agents and to manage these agents. So I think that's a people management, it's also about agent management. And, again, this is not just hospitality, I think this is kind of really changing the way how we kind of frankly live on this planet and work on this planet. So kind of, yeah, it's a little bit of a far stretch here. But I think that's that will raise some fundamental questions in the next years to come. And I think you're touching on more the hotel operation side of how it's going to revolutionize that.
Ana:But I guess there's also an impact on the traveler, right? Susanna, what do you think?
Suzanna:Yeah, absolutely. So we believe that the adoption of AI tools is going to change the way travelers interact either with platforms where they can do their shopping of their rooms, or when they interact with the hotels themselves. Even though we're talking a lot about automations, computers, and so forth. But I think the hoteliers themselves, they're very cautious of the fact that any adoption of the technology is there to enhance guest experience. It's not about taking out the human touch. That is always about being able to use technology to enhance the experience, to enhance the human touch in the right way. So for example, just walking through the traveler end-to-end journey. Generative AI tools and AI analytics, they can help hoteliers and travel sellers to be able to personalize even landing pages. Those are all their marketing material based on their understanding of you, which now with more sophisticated algorithms do very fine micro segmentation. It's on what you like, what you don't like. It's the analytics on your historical booking patterns and whatnot. So to be able to be more effective in their marketing campaigns and help travelers to get to their offer faster. So the travelers can also use the interactive dialogue engines to say missing information that have not been provided in the first instance. Very quickly to say going into the maybe the filtering criterias that we used to use. Nowadays with the more widget-based interfaces, but using languages as well to be able to find the best room in the hotel. Not only just at the hotels themselves. When they arrive at the hotel, so talking about human touch, but sometimes it's looking for their Wi-Fi password, setting up a morning call. There are things that if you can just make a voice command, then things can be done for you very efficiently without waiting for that phone call to be picked up. I think those will also be services that will be highly appreciated by hotel guests. Not to forget about the robots that are already roaming around in some of the hotels that I've been to. Cleaning robots, delivering robots. Some people like them, somebody just maybe less so. But once again, I think it provides a full range of possibilities. To say, is it about the mid-range hotels? Is it about high-range hotels? How the hotels are able to use technologies to serve the segment of the market that they target. And talking about agents as well, I noticed that Felix mentioned about agents. Over a year, we think that's five years. Let's give it an inspirational thought to notice that in a world where each traveler will be represented by their own AI agent. An agent that acts like your VIP concierge. You just tell them where you need to go and what time. Or maybe they would find that out from your calendar on behalf of you already. And be able to represent you to negotiate with the travel agent, who is also the AI-based automatic on the travel seller side. And these agents, maybe they're communicating in a language that humans don't even understand. But they represent a data compliant way, in a way, to be able to speed up the booking process. But at the same time, they're finding exactly the right travel options for the traveler. So yes, there are a lot of promises. So we're excited to work in this age where there are a lot of opportunities offered by this new technology.
Ana:And sorry, since I have you here, Felix was just talking about how he sees AI, not only in the hotel space, but in growing in other travel verticals, I guess. What is your perspective?
Suzanna:What can you tell us about AI adoption in other travel segments or travel verticals? Absolutely. So as I said, AI is inevitably making an impact to all the verticals in travel as we see it. In the travel seller space, they actually have a situation that is quite similar to what Felix has described. They also have call centers facing with a lot of email requests, a lot of phone call requests, asking for changes, difficult travel options, so on and so forth. And so in that environment, similarly, we are seeing opportunities to automate simple requests, to offer traveler faster response times, and also tools to support travel agents to be able to help them with training, having more new staff in our industry at the moment, supporting them in doing certain tasks, but also just being able to monitor efficiencies and just being able to distribute the task to the agents who are more familiar or who are the best in dealing with certain type of problem solving. So that is what we are seeing happening on the travel seller side. And the same terms for airlines. Airlines, they are having similar experiences in terms of personalizations, being able to generate new destination pages, automatically optimizing them for SEO, so on and so forth, to be able to increase time to market, also reducing traffic acquisition costs. This type of propositions is across the board, not just hotels, airlines, travel sellers. We are all trying to experiment, using the technologies to be more effective, especially around the marketing content generation side. This is my personal favorite. For Amadeus, we are also using generative AI for fairer and a more inclusive biometric facial recognition. What is that? This is about training airport biometric solutions using a significant volume of AI-generated faces. So this helps to overcome privacy concerns, but at the same time, to make sure that the amount of data that goes in fairly represents diversity of the populations that will be using the system. So that is where the fairness and the more inclusive aspects comes in. There are many use cases. We are only listing a few that we are seeing a very, very interesting in-road to say into going into production. Definitely more to come. Great.
Ana:Interesting. Let's end with a couple of hopefully quick fire questions. We've talked a lot at length about AI. Susanna, other transformative technologies in the industry that you're watching, but that are not AI?
Suzanna:Absolutely. Yes. This one took me a minute to think about. I think it is already time to talk about quantum. Gardner predicts that quantum computing will be ready for production use within the next five years. Maybe commercial applications is more like to say 2035 or even later. But despite of this, we are definitely seeing a lot more discussion around quantum. The possibility of this exponentially higher computing power. What are the possibilities? Even though there's a little bit of what Felix has said, there's a technology that we're trying to find a problem for it to solve. Maybe around cryptography. I think there are already discussions about that. What would the impact be to cybersecurity? There's a lot of the operational research problems, optimization problems. There are things that is at the moment, even supercomputers would run out of time to solve. So let's take another look and see whether to do with the power of the quantum so that we can once again leapfrog to the next level of possibilities.
Ana:Yeah. And Felix, Hibern's story is a perfect example of what transformation looks like in our industry. But I guess every founder has learned tough lessons. What is one lesson you learned the hard way? And how did it shake the way you innovated Hibern?
Felix:So one lesson that I learned the hard way, I think is that of all technology is easy. Technology is not the problem. What for the challenge the last years was more on a personal front, actually, how do I get not lost on the journeys as a founder, like with crazy input from left and right, like every day, like changes coming at you in light speed, and not losing yourself, but at the same time, building technology and transformative solutions. So I think that the technology side of things and building stuff is actually quite simple. But for me, the hard lesson was how do I balance that with personal life, the family around me, friends around me and then combining these both worlds. So that was probably as a founder, the most difficult part. Yeah.
Ana:And, okay, then one thing, I'm just trying to think, one thing that you would like to change, if you could, about the industry that you're working in?
Felix:The industry. Yeah, I think it comes again, back to the technology side is easy. It's more the people side of things that are probably difficult. What I would love to change is that we all kind of chill a little bit and make things a little bit simpler. And what I mean by that is if I look into our engagements with hotel chains, with franchise partners, with operators, it's hyper complex. And I don't think it has to be complex, but there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of like, okay, I don't want to step on somebody's toe. And actually, the responsibilities here are not there. And I think it actually could be simple. So if I could change something is that everyone, again, chills a little bit, and we could simplify how we think about the whole thing and make streamlined processes, streamlined organizations, to be able to implement technologies faster, because technology is there, the problems are there, the solutions are there. But what stops us is the way of how people think about change management, overhead, these kind of things, that's kind of something that I think, box us down in the industry down. And that's something I'd love to love to somehow change. If I would have this magic wand. Yeah. And last question for you, Suzanne, I mean, you've been working in Amadeus Ventures for a while.
Ana:And is there one lesson that you've learned in particular you want to share with us about working closely with startups like Hiver?
Suzanna:Yeah. So we made our first investment back in the year, towards the end of year 2013. And overall, we've made 23 investments now. Eventually, to say that the range of results, not to say that with the portfolio companies, to say fostering the partnership between them and Amadeus, I would say to say there are always cases where to say they are successful, more successful than the others. And so within this range of experience, not to say, but what I've learned is I would say is, yes, then a true partnership between corporate and startups is possible. And it can be very beneficial. To say, just recapping the points, startups bring agility and innovative solutions, corporates as we have established distribution network and the reach to potential customers. And leveraging each other's strengths, it does require effort, it does require significant communications, empathy, and trust. I'm happy to share a positive example. It is one of the investments that we've made, a company called Volanteo, based in the U.S., working on an airline solution. We made the investment in year 2019, before the pandemic, they talked it through. And very recently, we announced a second partnership with them, which is the signing of the partnership with Naviter, to say complementing the partnership that they already have with our platform. So last year, as you say, together with Naviter, they signed Air Canada. So one of the big airlines is the customer. And we are actually anticipating to say the announcement of another large airline customer coming soon. And so I would say, these success stories also reminds us that it is possible to foster the partnership, it is possible to be able to leverage the strengths of the both parties. So yeah. So watch this space. Absolutely.
Ana:Great. So that brings us to the end of today's episode. I mean, we've talked about AI, about hotel operations, quantum, robot cleaning. A few takeaways from me for our conversation is really how fast AI is reshaping how hotels manage their groups and meetings. It's probably happening faster than many of us may realize. How innovation and hospitality needs both both startups like Hiver, like Felix, as supporting partners to succeed. And how Hiver and Amadeus, we're seeing how collaboration can really unlock transformative, real results. Thank you very much for being here today. Thank you for sharing your insights. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in, for listening. To find out more, visit amadeus.com forward slash transforming dash travel. And to catch more episodes like this one, subscribe to the Amadeus Travel Tech Talk podcast on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Thanks very much, everybody.