Dive Brief:
- Hilton is rolling out a generative AI-powered digital concierge to help customers plan trips at its properties with conversational language, the company announced Tuesday.
- Currently in beta, the Hilton AI Planner is available to a small subset of customers on hilton.com and can help users decide on their destination, compare properties and explore amenities.
- Users can ask the AI concierge such questions as “Where can I stay during peak cherry blossom season?” or “I want to go to the beach somewhere this summer with my family, what do you recommend?” The AI concierge can respond with travel location options and ask follow-up questions to help narrow down choices for customers.
Dive Insight:
Hilton’s AI concierge is meant to make travel planning at Hilton properties more intuitive and frictionless — and it catches the hotelier up to other major travel companies that already have AI agents.
“The launch of the Hilton AI Planner marks another step forward in our journey to reimagine the travel experience for Hilton guests,” Michael Leidinger, SVP and CIO at Hilton, said in a prepared statement. “This is just the beginning and a preview of where we’re going, as we continue to focus on providing thoughtful, purposeful innovation that empowers travelers.”
Consumers are open to using AI for research. Riskified research from the fall found that some of the top use cases for AI assistants are product ideas, summarizing reviews and comparing prices. AI travel planners like Hilton’s fit such needs.
Other hotel and travel brands already have AI concierges on the market. IHG tapped Google Cloud to roll out its AI-powered travel planner in 2024, and Marriott International’s Renaissance Hotels and Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy rolled out AI tools on their respective websites in 2023 and 2024.
Expedia provided conversational trip planning to consumers in 2023, and in 2025 introduced a function allowing Copilot to book tickets on users’ behalf at sites including Expedia and Vrbo, the company’s rental listing marketplace. Booking.com rolled out AI-powered features to make trip planning easier in 2024.
Hilton said it is approaching its generative AI-powered concierge from a “test-and-learn approach,” and will take real behaviors and direct feedback to fuel improvements. The tool will “eventually expand to more users as the Hilton AI Planner evolves.”
