How to bring the power of AI to your hotel operations with Make & ChatGPT

Transforming guest services with AI has never been easier. An Artificial Intelligence agent can offer information about bookings, sending invoices via email, and updating reservation details - all set up in just a few hours. Thanks to Apaleo’s robust APIs and no-code automation platforms like Make.com, creating a powerful AI assistant and chatbot interface for your hotel is straightforward and quick.

If you’ve interacted with ChatGPT before, you might have concerns about its reliability as a hotel assistant. AI can sometimes generate responses that sound convincing but are inaccurate, and ensuring precision in guest services is critical. Hotel groups need to provide accurate room availability, precise quotes, and secure booking options—all while safeguarding customer data.

Here’s where Makeitfuture steps in. As an agency specialised in no-code automation, Makeitfuture excels at rapidly creating and deploying AI agents tailored specifically to the needs of hotels. Leveraging Apaleo’s APIs and automated workflow creation in Make.com, they’ve developed an AI assistant capable of handling bookings and invoicing with a level of reliability that you and your guests can depend on. 

Curious to see it all in action? Dive into our webinar where Apaleo's very own CTO, Stephan Wiesener, teams up with Tiberiu Socaci, Co-Founder & CEO of Makeitfuture, to bring you an exclusive live demonstration! Watch them break down the beginning of this journey and reveal actionable insights that you can put into practice right away. You won’t want to miss it!

The guest experience

When a guest checks their reservation status on your website, the AI-driven chatbot takes over. It asks for a booking code and email address, ensuring that it only shares details with the right person. Once verified, it pulls up the most current information about their stay and sends a detailed invoice if requested. This process is not just automated; it’s intelligent and secure, enhancing both the guest experience and your operational efficiency.

The answer is based on the actual booking information.

The technology behind the scenes

Setting up an AI assistant involves these key components:

• Access to Apaleo’s APIs

• An OpenAI account (hint: It’s not the same as a ChatGPT account!)

• A chatbot backend (we recommend Voiceflow)

• A no-code automation platform that binds everything together (we recommend Make.com)

Creating a specialised AI assistant

Creating a specialised AI assistant is like equipping a GPT model with superpowers tailored specifically for your hotel. With the OpenAI platform, you can design a version of ChatGPT that speaks in your hotel's unique tone, follows specific rules, and integrates detailed information about your operations

Once your AI’s tone and behaviour are set, it’s time to enhance its capabilities. This involves linking the AI assistant to other services like reservation systems or payment processors using a feature called function calling. This allows the AI to formulate and execute technical queries effectively, integrating seamlessly with your existing systems.

Thanks to Apaleo’s versatile APIs, adding functionality is straightforward. To demonstrate this, Makeitfuture has integrated the AI assistant with Apaleo’s booking and invoicing systems. This means that the assistant can retrieve live data about bookings and handle transactions efficiently. Importantly, your guests and team won’t need a ChatGPT account to use these services; everything operates through secure API access.

Giving the AI assistant a friendly face

Creating a friendly and functional client interface is crucial. Makeitfuture uses Voiceflow, a robust tool for designing AI-powered chat widgets, to build a visually appealing and intuitive chatbot. Voiceflow enables customisation of colours, icons, and avatars, ensuring that the chatbot reflects your hotel's brand. It also provides chat logic and integrates with webhooks to notify the AI when its services are needed.

Voiceflow provides chat logic and interface

No-code automation: the glue that holds everything together

To seamlessly connect the AI assistant with your property management system or any other booking or invoicing system, Makeitfuture relies on Make.com, a no-code platform that simplifies the integration process. Make.com allows for visual setup and easy connection of various services, addressing common challenges like AI misinformation and data security. For instance, when a guest requests booking information, the AI assistant sends a query to Apaleo via Make.com, retrieves accurate data, and presents it to the user.

With Make.com, we collect and share real-time data from Apaleo with the AI assistant.

To protect guest data, the AI assistant is programmed to respond only to customers who can provide two correct pieces of information: the booking reference and the email address. This security feature is implemented through our no-code interactions with the AI assistant. When it requests an email from the customer, it triggers a function that checks reservations in Apaleo. Make.com returns Apaleo's response to the AI assistant, which then verifies that the reservation number matches the provided email before offering further booking information or sending an invoice.

AI + Apaleo + no-code automation open up a world of many possibilities

Thanks to no-code technologies, this AI-powered concierge is remarkably easy to set up, providing accurate, instant, and secure hotel customer service within hours. When you have an idea, you cannot afford to wait for months or even years before a software development team transforms it into workable software. Companies like Makeitfuture can deliver it in days. If something needs fine-tuning or changing, the process is as easy as swapping one building block with another. And finally, it’s easier to train your staff into handling the most common errors in the no-code automation workflows, so they can easily keep everything running smoothly. 

While managing reservations is just one aspect of what an AI assistant can do, Apaleo's API endpoints and AI-driven technology open up a world of many possibilities. You can expand the assistant's capabilities to create and confirm reservations during customer chats, handle check-in and check-out processes, process and verify credit card payments, and manage inventory. The potential applications of AI extend beyond reservations—imagine managing check-ins, processing payments, and more, all through a single AI assistant.