From AI agents to front desk: How to personalize the guest experience with both

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, sits down with Chris Koehler, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, to explore the fast-moving intersection of AI, guest data, and the future of hospitality personalization. As the CMO of one of the world's most trusted consumer engagement platforms — and a partner of Revinate — Chris brings a perspective that is both industry-wide and refreshingly personal. He is the exact guest hotels should be designing for: a frequent business traveler with strong preferences, no interest in loyalty points, and clear memories of every time a property got personalization right — or embarrassingly wrong.

What you'll learn:

● The personalization gap is real and measurable: Twilio's State of Customer Engagement report finds that 82% of brands believe they provide good or excellent customer engagement, but only 45% of consumers agree. That disconnect is not a technology failure — it is a data activation failure.

● The booking journey has fundamentally changed: In under a decade, travelers moved from travel agents to Google to LLMs. Chris planned an entire two-week Rome family trip through ChatGPT — day-by-day itinerary, museum tickets, hotels, and restaurants. Hotels that are not preparing for an agent-mediated booking world are already behind.

● AI-to-AI negotiation is coming: The next iteration of the booking journey will not involve guests searching or calling at all. Personal AI agents with rich traveler profiles will engage directly with hotel AI agents to find the right match, negotiate, and confirm — and the hotels with the cleanest, most accessible data will win that exchange.

● The personalization bar is lower than hoteliers think: Chris's examples are not complex. Extra coffee pods. Sparkling water in the mini bar. Not leaving a bottle of wine for a guest who does not drink. A welcome-back greeting at check-in. These signals exist in the data already — the problem is getting them in front of the right team member at the right time.

● Loyalty is about comfort and familiarity, not points: For frequent business travelers, the emotional drivers of loyalty are recognition, routine, and the sense that a property understands them. Points are largely irrelevant to this segment — and yet most loyalty programs are still built around them.

● Seamless AI-to-human handoff is the next frontier: Today the handoff between AI and human agents is deeply frustrating — guests repeat their entire story from scratch. The future requires a unified data profile that follows the guest across every touchpoint, digital and in-property, so no context is ever lost.

● Technology should follow the experience, not lead it: Chris's most important advice for non-technical hoteliers is to stay grounded in the guest experience they want to deliver and let technology serve that vision — not the other way around.

● Dedicated thinking time is not optional: The pace of change in AI is too fast for part-time attention. Chris's advice is to assign people specifically to tracking and preparing for these shifts — because being caught flat-footed is a business risk.

● Traveler bifurcation is coming: The market will split between guests who embrace fully agentic experiences and those who seek out human connection as a premium. Knowing where your property sits in that spectrum — and preparing for both — is the strategic decision hoteliers need to make now.

Karen and Chris also discuss what it means to be truly ready for an AI-driven world, why clean and accessible data is the foundation of every personalization strategy, and what role Revinate and Twilio play in helping hotels reach the other side of that equation.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Chris Koehler here:

Connect with Karen Stephens here:

Follow the podcast here:

Episode Highlights

[04:54] The ten-time guest who still gets asked "have you stayed here before?" — Chris sets the personalization stakes with a story from the night before the recording. Checking into a boutique hotel he has visited at least ten times, the front desk agent asked if he had stayed before. "My goodness, just such an opportunity to say welcome back. And we've been talking about personalization in travel and hospitality for a very long time. One of my jokes is the only personalization we often see when we stay in a hotel is your name on the TV and nothing else." The data exists. The problem is getting it to the right person at the right moment.

[06:19] How ChatGPT replaced the travel agent — Chris walks through the full arc of how consumers find and book travel — from brick-and-mortar travel agents, to Google, to the LLM era — with a personal example that makes the shift tangible: "Last year I spent a couple of weeks in Rome with my family, and we basically trip-planned the whole thing through ChatGPT. Day-by-day itinerary, give us links to the museums, where we need to buy the tickets, what hotels should we stay in, which restaurants should we consider that are within walking distance." The next step, he predicts, is personal AI agents negotiating directly with hotel AI agents on the guest's behalf.

[13:09] The 82/45 disconnect — Chris shares data from Twilio's State of Customer Engagement report that reframes how the entire industry should measure personalization success: "82% of brands believe they're providing good or excellent customer engagement, but only 45% of consumers agree. So there's like this big disconnect around how we think we're doing as an industry, yet the consumer doesn't agree." He pairs it with the opportunity: "88% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand if the engagement is personalized in real time."

[13:46] What personalization actually looks like — Chris makes the case that meaningful personalization does not require sophisticated technology — it requires using the signals guests are already giving. Extra coffee pods. Sparkling water. Not leaving wine for a guest who does not drink. "When I show up, just welcome me back. Little things like that. The bar's not that hard. You know what I mean? It's not that hard." His point lands because every hotel already has this data. The gap is activation, not collection.

[20:36] The bifurcation of travelers — As the conversation reaches its conclusion, Chris identifies the strategic question every hotelier needs to answer before the agentic world arrives: "Those that are gonna engage and be fully agentic, not do any of the work themselves — that's one segment. And then I think you're gonna have those that value the human touch and the human experience almost as a luxury." He sees some brands already leaning into the human-only position as a competitive differentiator — and predicts the market will split more sharply in the years ahead.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro

02:14 - Chris Koehler's career and the psychology of customer engagement

04:37 - Why personalization in hospitality is still falling short

06:19 - AI agents and the transformation of the booking journey

11:01 - The seamless handoff: AI, humans, and what guests actually want

13:46 - What meaningful personalization looks like at scale

18:23 - How hoteliers should prepare for the agentic world now