Anyone who stays in hotels, be it on vacation or for business, knows one thing: the experience from one hotel to another is never the same. Multiple factors influence satisfaction for hotel guests, but oftentimes it’s little conveniences and the perception of a hotel team all pulling in the same direction that add up to a great stay.

Metaguest.AI (CSE:METG) Chief Executive Officer Tony Comparelli sees this dynamic from an insider’s perspective, as his company’s AI-based systems help hotels to operate more efficiently, enhance the guest experience, and maximize opportunities to generate revenue beyond room fees. The performance of their initial platform has won the confidence of some of the world’s top hotel brands, confirmed by a long list of new locations ready to come on board.

Comparelli spoke with Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine in early April about the technology behind Metaguest.AI’s rapid growth, his expectations for continued expansion, and how major hotels helped the young company refine its products early on.

Metaguest.AI uses advanced AI to improve the experience people have when staying at hotels. What aspects of the hotel industry guide the development of your products?

Through our journey of discovery in this industry, we learned that hotel operators face a number of issues. A combination of staffing challenges and finding appropriate team members so that you can operate efficiently is one.

But more importantly, hotels are pretty technology deficient. They use a variety of systems to run their operations, including different booking systems, property management systems, hospitality systems, and room service systems. Some are integrated but most are fragmented – they don’t talk to each other. It makes it difficult to operate efficiently.

What does Metaguest.AI do for hotels to make them run better?

Every business has a driver at the heart of what it does, and with hospitality the driver is always the guest. At the core of everything Metaguest.AI does is improving and enhancing the guest experience, from check-in to check-out. Ultimately, if a hotel continually delivers a positive guest experience, it influences booking rates and frequency.

Metaguest.AI installs an AI framework in every hotel we work with. It is unique to that hotel, and it learns the behaviour and habits of its guests, such as requests and responses and the things needed to make the guest’s stay more enjoyable.

As with any AI model, our technology self-learns and becomes more efficient in dealing with guest requests.

For example, I need towels in my room. What Metaguest.AI does for a hotel, using the platform at that level, is to take the request by answering the phone or through the guest interface. How many towels do you need, and what is your room number? The system will then communicate with the hotel inventory system and might determine that there are towels on the fifth floor. It will log the request, dispatch the housekeeper, and give them instructions, all without any human interaction.

It can also do everything from booking an event for you to booking a restaurant reservation and your transportation. It will connect all of the dots and as a guest you can interact with it in 31 languages. It will ask questions to learn about your request and then take care of it on your behalf.

Are you consistently improving the product? If so, how does that work? Is it in reaction to customer feedback?

When we install a framework in a hotel, we put in a language model that we call a “data set” that is unique to that hotel. We first have to monitor the system to make sure that it is not providing information that is not relevant to the hotel. We tweak the algorithms, and it will self-correct. In other words, every time there is an interaction with the system by a guest or employee, it will remember everything that happened – how it delivered and what the response was. And it will get better at doing things. It even generates code to fix the algorithm in order to be more efficient – it is that intelligent. There has not been an innovation in hospitality that is so game-changing since LodgeNet 25 years ago.

You have many partners using the product now. Can you share some names with us?

In 2022, we were looking for hotels that would pilot the technology and test the product. We went to Manhattan and identified eight properties, and these were brands that you would know within the Marriott and Hilton families that worked with us to refine it.

In April 2023, the platform was ready for general use. We spoke with groups in the Manhattan area and quickly were able to sign a number of hotels across all brands. Any brand you can think of, we have at least one property using our platform: Hyatt, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Marriott, Radisson – you name it.

We didn’t expect it, but our early expansion came through one hotel operator talking to another hotel operator, and it just started to spread. Currently, we don’t have an outbound hotel marketing team. We have 310 hotels on the platform right now and over 700 on the waitlist. So, it has been an amazing journey from eight hotels in the spring of 2024 to now 300 hotels. And we are looking to grow to 3,000 hotels by the end of 2026.

Of the 300 hotels we have, not one has come back and said our system was not for them. Attrition has been zero. We attribute that to working with hotels that are forward-thinking, want to innovate and want to provide the best service to the guest.

What is your model from a sales perspective? This sounds like a perfect business for generating recurring revenue.

We have a three-phase revenue approach. Phase 1 is what we are in today, and it is called Digital Concierge. All of the revenue is generated through businesses that are local to the hotel and generate revenue through the hotel. So, if a hotel does not have a gym, it has a partnership with a gym or a spa or restaurants in the area. We work with those local businesses, and the businesses pay to access the guests at the hotel during their stay. We share part of that revenue with our hotel partners.

Phase 2 is linked to automating the enterprise, where the hotel itself will pay a fee to automate within its environment. It ranges from $1 per room per month up to $20 per room per month, depending on all the enterprise systems they want to connect.

Phase 3 is the supply chain. We have 80 hotels in Manhattan right now, for example, and we will then allow the supply chain – the food companies, the linen companies, the service companies – to pay a fee to access information to make their operations more efficient.

Currently, we are generating about $6,000 per hotel per year based on the business subscribers that support their local hotels.

What does the future hold for Metaguest.AI?

The hospitality industry is not unique in the markets we go into. The U.S. market is no different from the Canadian market or the South American market or the global market for that matter. We see a global expansion strategy that allows us to license our technology in markets all over the world and become a major player in the hospitality industry.

In the next two years, our focus is to grow in the U.S. and have a dominant position in our markets, like we have in New York City and South Florida. Then we can look at expansion across the world. We already have hotel partners with international presence that are European or Dubai-based and are eager to welcome our technology to their markets.

This story was featured in Canadian Securities Exchange Magazine.

Learn more about Metaguest.AI at https://www.metaguest.ai/.