This week on The Hotel Spotter:
From luxury resorts in Saudi Arabia to city boutiques in San Sebastian, we share the hottest openings this week. Also, don’t miss our deep dive into how hotels are using AI and Melia’s withdrawal from Cuba.
The best new hotels this week:
Six Senses AMAALA
Six Senses has opened its second property in Saudi Arabia, part of the AMAALA development on the northwest coast of the Red Sea.
W Riyadh – KAFD
W Hotels has opened its first property in Saudi Arabia, with a 210-room hotel in the capital Riyadh.
Hotel Palacio Bellas Artes San Sebastián
The 1914 Beaux Arts building, Palacio Bellas Artes, has been reopened for the first time in four decades as an 81-room boutique hotel.
AI might offer hotels the chance to streamline backend processes — but the real opportunity comes in enhancing the guest experience with a human touch
Check in to the Otonomus Hotel, just off the Las Vegas strip, and you’ll be greeted by Oto, a humanoid robot concierge. The self-proclaimed ‘world’s first AI-powered hotel’ sees artificial intelligence taking care of everything from reservations and check-in to housekeeping and room settings.
But there’s an important distinction for Debbie Ong, executive vice president at Otonomus. She explains: “AI is not there to make our hotel feel cold. AI for us is meant to make things easier and the hotel feel warmer.”
Clearly the hotel industry is no stranger to artificial intelligence, with booking systems, revenue management and guest experience all benefiting from streamlined processes. And with 98% of hoteliers using AI across their operations, according to research from hospitality technology platform Mews, it’s perhaps far more embedded than many people think.
But it’s still early days for a lot of hotels, with much of that use in testing or early implementation stages. A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report confirms a similar statistic on widespread adoption (91%) but with only 3% achieving full enterprise-wide implementation.
Melia Hotels International is set to withdraw from Cuba on 24 July, citing difficulties in maintaining “a minimum level of operational stability”.
The Spanish hotel group, which manages more than 380 properties in over 40 countries, first made the announcement to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) in Madrid on 3 June.
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