A Hospitality Industry Without Hospitality ⇥ 404media.co

There was once a time when the hospitality industry was staffed by people who were at least nominally interested in the comfort and happiness of their guests. Yes, of course it was also about making money — like any job — but the reason someone would be a guest’s point of contact in a restaurant or hotel was because they were pretty good at service. That still exists, but they are now competing with people who hate everything about their guests except the money they bring.

Joseph Cox, of 404 Media, looked at a bunch of large language model platforms that help automate guest interactions for Airbnb owners:

Airbnb told 404 Media it does allow certain hosts to use tools that can reply on their behalf outside of a host’s typical hours, and 404 Media found several companies offering the tech, suggesting this host’s use of AI to talk to guests is not an outlier.

The first one Cox mentions is HostBuddy AI, and I do not think his brief overview does justice to this thing. Their minute-long promo video is nauseating. “Running short-term rentals should be rewarding, not exhausting,” the voiceover begins, “but guest messages never stop”. As someone who has been in the service industry, though not in a hotel, I have sympathy for the exhaustion that comes with answering constant requests. But guess what? That is the job. That is the whole point of this industry.

A charitable view of a tool like this one is to think about what role newer technologies could play in delivering good answers immediately to rote questions, so staff can spend their time on things that require more thought. (At 44 seconds in, the HostBuddy video has an extremely helpful chart illustrating the benefits of this.) But, as Cox writes, Airbnb hosts do not stand behind A.I. responses and reserve the right to override them. HostBuddy itself disclaims responsibility for its accuracy. Meanwhile, on its pricing page, HostBuddy says one of the features it offers is a custom tone and delay in messages, “to match your brand voice and operational workflow”. Neither of these things do a good job of using the benefits of a computer to help guests. Instead of sterile accuracy, a generative A.I. model synthesizes a maybe-correct answer; also, the only reason I can think of for delaying an A.I. response is to mask its origin. These features get in the way of what computers can do really well.

Also on its pricing page, HostBuddy says operator-users can “[r]estrict specific information based on reservation phases to ensure sensitive data like property addresses is only shared with appropriate guests”. A hotel does not need to hide its address. In that video, HostBuddy brags about being scalable for hosts “whether you manage one property or a thousand”, which kind of gets to the heart of the problem: Airbnb has professionalized hospitality for people who do not actually want to be in this business. Just as how Ticketmaster used to enable professional ticket scalpers, tools like HostBuddy and the multi-property management platforms Airbnb “partners” with reveal the lies these businesses are built on. Ticketmaster’s resale system was not helping you find tickets offered by fans who can no longer make the event; it was full of people exploiting demand. Airbnb is not full of couches and spare rooms; it is a series of individual hotel rooms hiding in a city’s regular housing stock.