AccorHotels Gets Personal

Tnooz just reported that the startup Travelsify has been selected by AccorHotels to add mood matching to its hotel search and trip planning. It is a sign of the times, where hospitality suppliers have started to recognize that Travel is all about the experience and that the product has more to do with emotion than the cut-and-dried check boxes for amenities, place, price and features. It’s also a result of the dramatic rise of Artificial Intelligence and smart systems as well as the growing understanding of how psychology influences travel planning.

Source Tnooz: AccorHotels lets travellers search for a property by mood

€2 Million Vote of Confidence for Mood Matching

The Travelsify startup has raised €2 million in seed funding from angel investors and the Luxembourg Ministry of the Economy to build the system now used by AccorHotels and a total of 300,000 hotels in all. The funding and the partnership with Accor demonstrates that persona matching technology has grown up and is now center stage as an alternative to traditional search for hotels and holiday experiences.

Marriott Hotels also got more personal with its persona quiz announced recently. It too confirms that hotel personality matching is now mainstream and not just a fun sideline to holiday planning. In fact, we believe that it is the future of Search in Travel.

Technology Pioneered by RealHolidays in 1999

This is not new and AccorHotels and Marriott are by no means the first mood matching solutions. The technology was pioneered a decade ago by RealHolidays, the precursor to the hotel personality matchmaker and PersonaHolidays.  That project is now FascinatingTravelers by pairing them with hotels and holiday experiences that match their personality.

Actually it is a little more in-depth than that; the engine behind it is firstly a system that brands hotel by personality. On the other end is the Matchwords Engine that takes those personalities traits and generates the travel persona words that fit the hotel personality. And it matches travellers with holiday experiences by predicting who they are based on what they do.

Persona Inference Engine Predicts Personality/Mood

PersonaHolidays for Fascinating Travelers is different to any other mood matcher, including how AccorHotels’ Travellers searches hotels by mood, in that travellers do not have to select a mood at all. The PersonaHolidays Inference Engine is actively at work with every user interaction to infer the travellers’ persona based on their activity.

The travellers’ persona is then matched with hotels and experiences. The expert system understands that every hotel offers a unique experience and that Travel is about experiences, not about products and, at the same time, appreciates that location, place, amenities and proximity are all important. It goes one step further by predicting mood and personality based on every user interaction.

PersonaHolidays and its underlying Personality Fascinating Technology understands the meaning behind travellers’ choices. Amenities and location are still important but more and more travellers are looking for a holiday that matches who they are, and Persona does that.

A separate search option is also available to let the system find one’s personality based on selecting personality preferences.

See a live installation at barbados.personaholidays.com

PersonaHolidays Matching Your Personality – The Hotel Matchmaker from RealHolidays on Vimeo

First Inference Engine for Travel

The PersonaHolidays approach is the result of 10 years of experience with the RealHolidays Hotel Matchmaker. It includes all the lessons learned in building the first Inference Engine for Travel. The Inference Engine facilitates personality matching by interpreting every user’s interaction in terms of its underlying motivation. Our personality matching expert system learns from all that a traveller is doing on the site and especially what they are looking at. It understands the traveller’s persona and the characteristics that best match that personality.

Of course, the Inference Engine is just one part of the system. It helps define the traveller but matching that with a hotel requires also knowing the personality of each hotel. For that the system uses the premier personality branding assessment tools in the industry. Each hotel is classified by a professional team that takes the hoteliers through a thorough assessment to uncover their personality and their Point of Fascination. The assessment is done for the managers/owners and for the brand itself.

Lightening Fast Search, Filtering & Visual Display

Most importantly, the technology is unparalleled in speed and insight, using advanced filtering and visual displays that simply jump off the screen. See the nuclear fast hotel search, filtering and pairing in the video below –

PersonaHolidays Visual Bookings Accelerator

Building on the Uniqueness of Each Hotel

PersonaHolidays matching systems understand what makes a hotel truly special. This comes from years of testing and aligning the systems with personal knowledge, brand psychology assessment and feedback from real guests. We have tracked thousands of travellers and correlated hundreds of matchwords with personality assessment to create a spot-on pairing experience for travellers.

Watch the video (above) to the end and you will be able to request a consultation and apply for details on the licensing for your market.

More about Licensing the technology, go to http://fascinatingtravelers.com/license