3 Ways Intent Driven Search Improves Your Hotel Guest Experience

Every interaction with your brand and services, from the first booking inquiry to the checkout process, plays a part in shaping your hotel guest experience.

Despite the overwhelming influence of the guest experience on key metrics and outcomes such as customer loyalty, repeat bookings, and positive reviews, new data suggest that the industry is falling short. According to J.D. Power's 2024 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, guest satisfaction scores dropped from 655 to 647 on a 1,000-point scale over the past year. The decline highlights the need for hotels to renew their focus on providing exceptional experiences.

While many different strategies could help address drops in guest satisfaction, a new and potentially transformational approach is to adopt AI-driven search that “best matches” user queries to your properties based on their travel goals, such as Mobi Intent Driven Search™.

Intent Driven Search focuses on ideal travel experiences instead of dates and locations. It uses natural language search powered by AI and combines it with a proprietary data set and advanced planning algorithms to help hotels create a great guest experience before the guest ever reaches the property. By offering  personalized recommendations for accommodations, amenities, and activities, hotels adding AI-powered search options from Mobi have the potential to substantially improve the overall guest experience.

Combining inspiration and discovery with a seamless booking experience and helping travelers find properties that fulfill their exact desires would encourage them both to book directly and return in the future—driving revenue while simultaneously reducing third-party commission fees.

Let’s explore how Intent Driven Search works and take a look at three key ways it enhances your hotel guest experience.

Understanding Intent Driven Search

AI-powered search has the potential to revolutionize the hotel and travel industries. So what does it entail?

Unlike traditional booking searches that rely on the “four boxes” of destination, check-in dates, and number of guests, Mobi Intent Driven Search™ uses a natural language interface to begin with the traveler’s broader travel goals. Whether your guests are looking for a “romantic weekend getaway at the beach” or a “family vacation with nonstop flights from Boston,” they’ll receive the best possible matches from your property list based on the true intent identified within their search.

Instead of narrowing results based on a fixed search query, this new approach to search helps your guests explore options and discover opportunities. Every search receives personalized recommendations that match the traveler’s underlying intent—even if they have only a vague vision or timeline for the trip.

What sets Mobi Intent Driven Search (IDS) apart for hotels is its ability to enrich hotel descriptions with live, real-world data. Developed with a proprietary global data store, Mobi is aware of the world around each property, covering everything from local events and climate to specific experiences such as nearby Michelin-star dining when offering results.

A personalized guest experience that begins in the planning stages stands out, which means your hotel might see stronger upfront engagement with future guests. Then, when your hotels are uniquely able to deliver on guests’ personal desires, you can help them create lasting memories while other hotels only help them accumulate points, less than half of which they’ll actually use.

By aligning guest searches with the perfect hotel stay, Mobi IDS helps shift the booking process from transactional loyalty to emotional loyalty, contributing to a more positive guest experience and a competitive edge for your brand in a commodified industry.

Now, let’s dive in and discover three ways the integration of AI-driven search in hospitality can positively impact traveler experiences.

1. Saving Time on Research and Planning

For some travelers, it can take up to 16 hours to plan and book a trip—and hotels often end up as the last piece of the puzzle. With so many options available, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the work of sifting through all the choices. Traditional search engines often return results that just aren’t relevant to your guests’ needs and force them to become keyword engineers.

It’s simple: Your guests don’t want to spend hours online hunting for the best experiences when they could just ask directly for what they want. When they can find out in seconds which hotels suit a set of needs, offer proximity to the specific activities they’re looking for, and include the right amenities, the entire research phase is reduced to minutes.

Mobi allows users to enter search terms and phrases that feel most important to them, in their own language, leading to the experiences they actually want and eliminating the need for ongoing evaluation of ultimately irrelevant options. Whether a traveler is seeking adventure, relaxation, or a family-friendly guest experience, Mobi IDS understands the intentions of the traveler through use of an LLM.

One of the main benefits to your guests is that this process saves them many hours of planning time. It also acknowledges and addresses the increasingly popular trend pushing for more experience-driven travel. In fact, 98% of travelers say they are choosing their next destination based on the promise of unique experiences. Today’s guests are interested in the memories they’ll make, and most of them care more than ever about access to the right activities to fulfill their next adventure.

As a solution that prioritizes experiences first, Mobi’s unique take on natural language search helps hotels engage guests earlier in the funnel and become a trusted resource for trip planning. By building a positive guest experience before guests even arrive, your organization can transform the nature of the relationship between guests and your brand.

2. Enhancing the Booking Process

Travelers are used to jumping back and forth between hotel websites, tours, and other tickets to compare dates, prices, and check availability. Adding Mobi IDS to your search options can eliminate the friction for your guests of having to know when and where they’re going before visiting your hotel website.

Mobi IDS ingests, cleans, and structures data from multiple sources to provide real-time and accurate information about anything and everything surrounding any location or property, from dining and transportation options to activities, attractions, wildlife, and more. This unlocks the ability to offer experience-led searches and provide specific recommendations for any customer query.

By ingesting property-specific data, Mobi IDS gives you the opportunity to increase revenues by driving more direct bookings and upselling services such as spa experiences or in-market activities. Intent Driven Search results provide guests with a more comprehensive view of your additional amenities, services, and attractions, such as which of your properties has the “best” pool, Thai massages, or lounge.

A simple search from your guests makes it easy for them to find suitable results because every AI-driven recommendation is a precise match for their travel goals. A guest could enter this search: “Pet-friendly hotels with nearby hiking trails for a family vacation.” AI search can instantly provide options aligned with those preferences, which saves your guests hours of comparison and back-and-forth as they try to decide where to stay. By reducing the number of steps and simplifying the decision-making process, this approach is likely to enhance the guest experience.

You might also see an improvement in booking completion rates. When guests are presented with choices that closely match their trip goals, the simplified and faster booking process could have a direct impact on hotel revenue.

3. Personalizing the Guest Experience

In the past, personalization in the travel and hospitality industries relied on predictions about guests based on their past behavior. Details such as previously selected room types or travel destinations would be recycled to offer similar stays with the assumption that past travel habits indicated future preferences.

But guest preferences are dynamic, changing based on where, when, why, and with whom they are traveling. Combined with a relatively low frequency of travel for most guests, traditional personalization methods often fall short of true personalization and do not help hotels compile detailed, accurate guest profiles.

With Mobi, personalizing the guest experience is as simple as allowing guests to state exactly what they want. With every search, they reveal their goals and preferences. Instead of guessing based on past behavior that no longer matches travelers’ current goals, hotels have the information they need to fulfill guest desires for their next stay.

For example: A traveler wants to go on a tropical vacation with access to a pool, the beach, and nearby waterfalls that’s a direct flight from their nearest airport. The typical approach to trip planning would be to comb through pages of Google search results to find places they can visit that meet their criteria.

From there, guests have to review dozens of options based on proximity to hikes and beaches, star ratings, and prices for different dates. AI-powered search can immediately identify the hotel from your portfolio with all the requested perks. By focusing on what matters most to the guest, hoteliers can offer a more fulfilling trip from the very beginning.

McKinsey research indicates that hotel loyalty program members are typically members of about three or four different programs. As hotels contend with fleeting loyalty and the challenge of getting repeat bookings, creating a memorable, personalized guest experience is a powerful way to encourage long-term relationships.