Avvio announces its AI-powered booking engine

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Avvio announces its AI-powered booking engine.

Hotel technology provider, Avvio, has announced the launch of Allora, what it describes as the world's first booking engine powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Allora uses artificial intelligence to learn from every online interaction. The first of the next generation of booking engines for hotels and accommodation providers, it focuses on driving direct booking and guest loyalty by orchestrating better online interactions between hotels and guests.

Allora uses Learning Models to analyse large volumes of data and identify which variations will yield the best booking engine configuration. In an era of exponential data, hotels sit on large tranches of information that they typically don't have the manpower to crunch. Allora does this for them, whilst building on intelligence from Avvio's hotel partner network. This means that each property can learn from similar properties to improve their performance much more quickly than if they were to rely solely on their own data.

Frank Reeves, Co-founder and CEO of Avvio, explains: "Hotels can benefit from Network Intelligence. With bigger data you unearth better patterns more quickly and rapid feedback leads to greater innovation. It enables each hotel to build on insights from across our network and drive precision with their own data. This boosts direct bookings and delivers a more personalised online service that reflects the exquisite experience hotel staff give to guests in-house."

Allora uses learned customer behaviour to create a unique conversation between the hotel and the guest by leveraging AI at the right moment, optimising and personalising their journey. Its sophisticated Recommender Engine moves the booking journey away from the one-size-fits-all model of today by making it dynamic, relevant and tailored to each shopper's needs and interests. This way, shoppers find what they're looking for faster and will likely feel a stronger emotional connection with the hotel, increasing their incentive to book direct.

Frank continues: "Ultimately Allora is more than a booking engine, it's a conversation platform, which is genuinely trying to curate a more refined and more appropriate experience for each website visitor. That may be a conversation about loyalty, a booking or an upsell. We can't continue to provide all customers with the same conversation."

Allora will do this by tracking and analysing data across hundreds of properties, based on geography, guest history, booking preferences, interactions on site, conversions and more. The platform will then curate relevant options based on demonstrated guest behaviour and optimise the booking journey to guide shoppers to book direct with as high a booking value as possible. Always in conversation, Allora learns and evolves with every interaction to deliver the best possible results.