What makes a brand desirable? For decades, luxury hospitality has relied on a familiar formula: high-touch service, iconic destinations, and the promise of exclusivity. Established brands built lasting reputations on these qualities, while newer players have worked to find distinctive ways to compete in a market shaped by tradition. But in the age of AI, that balance – and the frontiers of brand-building – are shifting.

Our latest New Codes of Luxury report, Elevating the Hospitality Guest Experience with AI, developed with Together Group, explores how AI is shaping the future of hospitality, and what that means for branding, marketing, and discoverability. One thing is clear: brands can no longer treat AI as a backend upgrade. It’s becoming a strategic interface – one that shapes how your brand is found, felt, and remembered.

For an industry that has often been slow to evolve, AI represents a turning point. “There’s been relatively little genuine innovation in the luxury and ultra-luxury hospitality sector, probably for decades,”says Georgia Fendley, founder of brand consultancy Construct. “I’m not negative about what exists now, but I think the sector is ripe for change.”

Yet while many brands are still playing catch-up, the market is signaling clear readiness. Our exclusive Future:Poll™ data shows that 88% of luxury travelers in the UK and US believe AI-enabled services will be important to luxury hotels within five years, and 39% already call them essential.

Part of the change means recognizing that AI is now a filter through which guests encounter your brand, whether through a chat-based concierge, a curated discovery layer, or a personalized itinerary. And if you don’t define what ‘on-brand’ looks like in this context, the tech will do it for you – and you could risk eroding the very equity you’ve spent years building.

Rethinking discovery

Nowhere is this clearer than in the challenge of discoverability. As travelers shift from search to AI-driven platforms for inspiration, being visible – and desirable – in these contexts demands a new skillset.

“As travelers increasingly turn to AI platforms such as ChatGPT for inspiration, we’re exploring generative engine optimization to stay ahead of the curve,” notes Dave Benton, founder of Metajive, a digital and AI solutions agency. That means training your models just as carefully as your marketing teams: not just for keywords, but for tone, context, and cultural relevance.

For brands, it’s increasingly about integrity as much as visibility. Alex Schellenberger, global chief brand and marketing officer at Mandarin Oriental, states this in no uncertain terms: “The machine is only as good as what you feed it. Be very clear and specific about your brand fundamentals, your tone of voice, your style guide – how you want this interaction to be done and shaped.” In other words, AI and guest data are becoming brand-critical. Data hierarchies, guest profiles, and even internal workflows are now essentially extensions of your customer experience – and more importantly, of your brand promise.

This is where challengers are moving fast. Without legacy systems or decades-old playbooks, newer brands can embed AI-native touchpoints from the ground up. Meanwhile, many heritage brands are still untangling siloed systems.

True personalization

“What used to happen is that you might have had five different profiles because all of the systems work in isolation. Using AI, we are able to have one combined knowledge… so we can now move into a much more personalized experience,” explains Schellenberger in Elevating the Hospitality Guest Experience with AI.

This is important because achieving true personalization has long been a core ambition for the world’s top luxury hospitality brands. Increasingly, guests want to stay somewhere they feel known. Some 47% of luxury travelers from the UK and US say they would pay 5–10% more for a highly personalized stay, according to our Future:Poll™ data.

And AI, at its best, can unlock that personalized – and human – service by doing the heavy lifting in the background. “There’s a fallacy of AI taking away human touch,” says Michael Grieve, chief brand officer at Jumeirah Group. “Luxury is only going to get more personalized – and more human. We won’t lose the human interaction.”

In fact, some of the smartest rollouts of AI will be those that free staff to focus on exactly that: the kinds of high-touch, improvisational moments that AI simply can’t replicate. The operations run smoother, but the relationships go deeper.

The Future Laboratory’s findings reveal this guest sentiment clearly: 63% say service should remain ‘human-first’, while 46% would value AI more if it freed up staff to spend time with them.

Where brand leaders go from here

So where does this leave marketers and brand leaders?

First, it means getting close to the architecture of the guest experience. If your brand values aren’t being encoded into your data flows, you’re missing the opportunity – and will soon be outsourcing your brand expression to the logic of the machine.

Second, it demands a strategic partnership between brand, tech, and operations. Why? Because AI is increasingly embedded across discovery, delivery, and post-stay engagement. Brand management teams need to lead on defining what luxury looks and feels like at every step.

Finally, it means asking harder questions about what your brand stands for – and how that translates into an experience that’s not just frictionless, but unforgettable.

In other words, technology must be approached with the same intentionality once reserved for design, cuisine, and location. In luxury hospitality, that bar is high – and rightly so. If we want AI to elevate the guest experience, we need to make sure it elevates the brand experience too.

Done well, AI can become the next great opportunity for brand storytelling in hospitality. Not because it moves faster, but because it lets brands go deeper.

The Drum

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