In the hospitality industry, a phone call has never been just a call. Behind questions like "Does the hotel have rooms available?", "Can I check in early?", or "Until what time does the restaurant serve?", there could be a booking opportunity, a service request, an issue needing resolution, or even a moment that determines whether a customer continues to choose the brand. For many years, hospitality businesses have handled these interactions primarily with front desk, reservations, or contact centre staff. While this model creates significant value through human interaction, it also has clear limitations regarding service hours, scalability, personnel costs, and consistency in response quality.

What_Is_Voice_AI_Comprehensive_Guide_Impact_redemens

The emergence of Voice AI, or voice-interactive artificial intelligence, is opening up a new approach. Instead of navigating phone menus, waiting for staff to answer, or searching websites for information, customers can now speak directly to an AI system using natural language. This system can recognise speech, understand intent, retrieve data, respond verbally, and in deeply integrated cases, even perform actions such as checking room status, creating service requests, or transferring calls to appropriate staff. This is no longer about a "phone-answering robot." Essentially, Voice AI is laying the groundwork for a real-time, always-available, and personalised customer service model. Notably, this shift is occurring as customers become increasingly familiar with AI. According to Decision Lab, approximately 78% of internet users in Vietnam had used at least one AI platform in the last three months by 2025, with 33% using AI daily. More remarkably, 67% of users reported that AI saved them time, while 48% found that AI improved accuracy. As customers grow accustomed to asking AI questions in natural language, their expectations for how brands interact will also change. Hospitality therefore faces a critical question: If customers can speak to AI everywhere, why should they accept slow, robotic, and inconsistent customer service when interacting with a hotel?

What is Voice AI?

Voice AI is an AI-powered system that listens, understands, processes, and responds using voice. A modern Voice AI system typically combines multiple technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition to convert speech to text, Natural Language Processing or Large Language Models to understand meaning, a conversational management system to maintain context, and Text-to-Speech to convert responses into natural-sounding speech.

voice-ai-thumb

The key difference between modern Voice AI and traditional voicebots lies in their ability to understand natural language. Traditional voicebots typically operate on fixed logic: "Press 1 to book a room, press 2 to speak to reception, press 3 for information." In contrast, Voice AI can process a natural statement like: "I'm arriving in Hanoi tonight, I want to book a room for two people and need to check in early around 10 AM tomorrow." The system can analyse the statement into multiple intents, identify the booking request, number of guests, length of stay, and early check-in requirement before continuing the conversation. This is the shift from Interactive Voice Response to Conversational AI. While IVR requires customers to learn how to "speak to the system," modern Voice AI aims for the system to learn how to understand how humans communicate.

Why is Voice AI particularly suited for the Hospitality industry?

Hospitality is an industry with a very high intensity of customer interaction. Guests may contact before booking, during the booking process, before arrival, during their stay, and after check-out. Each stage generates a different set of needs. Before their trip, guests might ask about prices, rooms, cancellation policies, airport transfers, or amenities. During their stay, guests might request extra towels, book a restaurant table, ask about spa hours, or report an issue in their room. After their trip, guests might need assistance with invoices, lost & found, or feedback on their experience.

voice-ai-1

A traditional customer service system must allocate staff to handle this volume of interactions. Voice AI offers the ability to process a portion of repetitive requests in real-time, while escalating complex cases to human agents. Deloitte, in its 2025 Travel Industry Outlook , notes that AI is being increasingly applied across the Travel industry, including customer service, operational optimisation, predictive maintenance, shopping, and discovery. Businesses are experimenting with applications that can simultaneously impact business efficiency and guest experience. Statista, compiling data from an Amadeus study, reports that 69% of surveyed Travel industry businesses use AI for customer support, making customer support one of the most common AI applications in the sector. These figures do not mean Voice AI is already a widespread technology in every hotel. On the contrary, they indicate a more significant trend: customer service is one of the most natural entry points for Hospitality to adopt AI.

How can Voice AI transform the hotel guest experience?

From call centre queues to "always-on" service

One of the most obvious benefits of Voice AI is its ability to provide 24/7 service. Customers don't need to worry if it's 2 PM or 2 AM, peak season or off-peak, because the system can receive calls at any time. This is especially important for hotels with a large international clientele. A request arising at midnight in Vietnam might occur during business hours in another market, but on-property staff are not always sufficient to maintain a large 24-hour contact centre. Voice AI can act as the first layer of service, receiving requests, determining complexity, and handling issues within its authorised scope. When human intervention is needed, the system can transfer the call along with the conversation context to an employee. This way, customers don't have to repeat the entire issue from scratch.

From answering questions to fulfilling requests

A truly valuable Voice AI should not merely provide information. Its greater value lies in its ability to connect with backend systems. When integrated with PMS, CRS, CRM, Booking Engines, or service management systems, Voice AI can transition from answering to action taking. Guests can inquire about room availability and receive information. They can request a booking and be guided through the process or have the booking made if the system is appropriately integrated. In-house guests can call to request extra towels or report a broken air conditioner; Voice AI can log the request and route it directly into the relevant department's workflow. This is crucial. If Voice AI can only answer questions but not perform actions, it remains a voice-enabled chatbot. When it can understand intent and trigger business processes, Voice AI begins to become a true AI Agent.

Voice AI and personalised customer service

One limitation of traditional customer service is that staff often only know what a customer says in the current conversation. However, if Voice AI is connected to CRM and relevant customer data, the system can understand a broader context. For example, a repeat guest can be identified immediately upon calling. The system can know what room type they previously stayed in, their typical length of stay, what services they used, or any special requests that were validly recorded. In such cases, the conversation no longer starts from scratch. However, personalisation does not mean AI should reveal everything it knows about the customer. This is a crucial issue related to privacy and user perception. A good system needs to know which information to use to better serve the guest and which information should not be directly introduced into the conversation. Euromonitor notes that GenAI is ushering in a new phase of hyper-personalisation, where AI can bridge the gap between consumer expectations and brand experience, while creating new revenue opportunities through customer experience and customer service.

A real-world example: Accor and the challenge of combining AI with humans

A notable case in Hospitality is Accor, which collaborated with Deloitte to build a cloud telephony platform and AI-powered customer service. According to Deloitte, the solution was deployed across 7 contact centres and 2,000 phone lines, and helped improve the productivity of 600 reservation agents globally in less than a year. The system can automatically handle suitable requests, while complex cases are still escalated to human agents. The solution was implemented to serve guests in over 110 countries.

accor-1-17387439536632119739485

The remarkable point here is not that AI "replaces" staff. On the contrary, the AI + Human model is the key lesson. AI handles repetitive interactions that require quick, standardised responses. Staff focus on cases requiring empathy, judgment, negotiation, or complex problem-solving. This approach also aligns with the nature of Hospitality. Technology can make service faster, but hospitality still needs humans to create emotion and trust.

Will Voice AI eliminate the "human touch" in Hospitality?

This is perhaps the most important question. Hospitality is built on graciousness. An overly robotic voice, out-of-context responses, or a failure to understand guest emotions can be counterproductive. Customers may accept AI when they need speed, but they still want to interact with humans when issues become complex or emotional. The European Accommodation Barometer 2025 study shows that 63% of accommodation managers in Europe rate AI as useful or very useful for customer service, while 51% rate AI as useful for guest experience and personalisation. At the same time, implementation costs and integration complexity with existing systems are major barriers to technology adoption. An Accor study also reveals that 44% of European travellers prefer both digital tools and human interaction for different needs during their travel journey. This reinforces an important principle: customers don't necessarily want "AI to replace humans"; they want to be served correctly, by the right channel, at the right time. Therefore, the future of Voice AI in Hospitality is not a hotel where guests only talk to robots. It is a hotel where AI handles what AI does best, and humans focus on what humans do best.

The Future of Voice AI: When Voice Becomes a New Hotel Interface

The development of Voice AI should be viewed within the broader context of AI Agents and conversational commerce. As language models become increasingly powerful, AI no longer just answers individual questions but can maintain context, analyse intent, and execute sequences of actions.

Images

In Hospitality, this could bring about a significant change. Customers won't need to remember which app the hotel has, where the website is, or the phone number of a specific department. They just need to state their needs. "Help me book a suitable room for my family." "Book me a dinner table for 7 PM." "I need an extra bed." "I want to know about child-friendly tours tomorrow." "I'm having trouble with the air conditioning." If Voice AI is connected to the hotel's data and workflow, these statements can become triggers for action, not just questions. From a strategic perspective, this is why Voice AI can become one of the key interface layers of Smart Hospitality. PMS still manages rooms. CRM still manages customers. RMS still manages revenue. But Voice AI can become a natural communication layer between the customer and the entire underlying ecosystem.

Voice AI will not replace Hospitality, but rather change how Hospitality is delivered

The future of customer service is not a competition between humans and AI. It is a redistribution of tasks between humans and technology. AI has advantages in speed, 24/7 availability, handling large volumes of interactions, data recall, and executing repetitive processes. Humans excel in empathy, judgment, creativity, handling exceptions, and creating emotional connections. Hospitality will be more effective when these two capabilities are combined. With nearly 87% of Vietnamese internet users having used AI tools in Q3/2025, according to Decision Lab, AI is becoming an increasingly familiar part of digital life. Meanwhile, Savills reports that the hotel market in Ho Chi Minh City achieved an occupancy rate of 68% in Q1/2025, a 2 percentage point increase year-on-year, as the market continues to recover and tourism demand remains positive. As demand grows, the number of interactions increases, and expectations for service speed rise, hotels will need more solutions to help them "work faster." They need technologies that help them serve smarter. Voice AI could be one such technology. It transforms calls from a passive communication channel into an intelligent interface, where customers can express their needs most naturally, and the hotel can respond, personalise, and act almost in real-time. The future of customer service, therefore, may not begin with a new screen. It may begin with a spoken word.

NewSun Hospitality: Preparing for the New Generation of Customer Service

Voice AI truly creates value only when integrated into a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. An AI system might converse naturally, but if data is unsynchronised, back-end processes are unstandardised, or staff don't know how to collaborate with AI, it's difficult to deliver a good experience. NewSun Hospitality partners with hotels and resorts to enhance management capabilities, standardise operations, and apply technology in Hospitality. From Customer Service, Reservation, Sales, Revenue Management to Marketing and Guest Experience, the goal isn't merely to introduce AI into the business, but to define what AI should do, what humans should do, and how data needs to be connected to generate real business value. If your business is exploring Voice AI, AI Concierge, AI Agent, or customer service automation solutions, contact NewSun Hospitality to assess your current situation and develop an implementation roadmap tailored to your operational model, technology systems, and revenue goals.

  • Hotline: +84 768 68 2913
  • Email: dosm@nshm.com.vn
  • Zalo OA: https://zalo.me/2452770272256938463 (NewSun Hospitality)
  • Website: https://nshm.com.vn/ (NewSun Hospitality)

References

  • Deloitte. (2025). 2025 travel industry outlook: Artificial intelligence ambition and anxiety amid acceleration. Deloitte Insights.
  • Deloitte. (2025). Accor harnesses the power of AI: Transforming customer service in hospitality. Deloitte.
  • Deloitte. (2025). How AI is revolutionizing restaurants. Deloitte Consumer Industry Center.
  • Decision Lab. (2025). The State of Consumer AI in Vietnam 2025. Decision Lab.
  • Decision Lab. (2025). The Connected Consumer Q3 2025. Decision Lab.
  • Euromonitor International. (2025). AI: A turning point in global travel. Euromonitor International.
  • Euromonitor International. (2025). Experience more with GenAI for value creation. Euromonitor International.
  • Savills Vietnam. (2025). Ho Chi Minh City market brief Q1/2025. Savills Vietnam.
  • Statista Research Department. (2025). Customer support is the most important AI use area in travel. Statista.
  • Statista Research Department. (2025). European Accommodation Barometer 2025. Statista.
  • Accor. (2024). AI combined with human touch: Accor Europe insights. Accor.