Hospitality brand boosts efficiency with AI-powered CRM

Solution

Features in use

Guest 360 interface

Front office teams must quickly understand a guest’s history, their preferred room type, past stay behavior, comfort preferences, and even their likelihood to accept an upgrade. Trying to manually evaluate all this during a rush hour check in often leads to generic room assignments, even for loyal guests. So a Guest 360 interface was created. Within the Guest 360 interface, AI agents analyze guest information in real time the moment a profile is opened. They evaluate multiple data points, including stay frequency, preferred room types, past upgrade acceptance, spending behavior, floor preference, AC preference, smoking preference, and room location choices such as proximity to elevators.

The implementation uses Zia Agents as the intelligence layer in Zoho CRM. A custom function sends guest history and real-time room availability data to the Zia Agent as a structured JSON request. Zia processes the information and returns a clean JSON response containing recommended rooms and upgrade suggestions, which are directly consumed within the application workflow.

Based on this analysis, the system instantly recommends the most suitable rooms from the currently available inventory. Reception teams no longer need to browse through multiple room options manually, which significantly reduces decision-making time during check-ins. AI agents also identify guests who are highly likely to accept premium room upgrades, and intelligently suggest suitable upsell opportunities.

Identity validation and eKYC

Identity verification is one of the most important steps during hotel check-in, but it's often handled through manual data entry. Front desk staff typically read guest identification documents and enter the details into the system, which can slow down the check-in process and increase the chances of human error.

To simplify this process, the hospitality organization implemented an AI-powered Identity Manager integrated with Zoho CRM using Zia Agents. Guests can upload identification documents such as Aadhaar cards, driver's licenses, or PAN cards, which the system automatically scans to parse document content. Key details, including guest name, date of birth, age, ID number, and document type, are instantly extracted and stored directly within the Guest Details module without requiring manual typing.

To further strengthen security and verification accuracy, the solution also includes an enhanced eKYC process. In situations where ID collection alone may not be sufficient, the system performs an additional identity validation step by comparing the guest's live photo with the photograph available on the uploaded ID document. A face match score is generated, and the verification status is clearly displayed to the staff, helping ensure that the correct guest is being checked in.
By automating identity validation and eKYC, the hospitality organization significantly reduced manual effort, improved check-in speed, minimized data entry errors, and enhanced guest verification accuracy while delivering a smoother and more secure guest experience.

Self check-in portal

To further streamline hotel operations and reduce dependency on front desk staff, the hospitality organization extended both Identity Validation and eKYC into a self check-in experience. A self-service portal was developed using Zoho Catalyst and integrated seamlessly with Zoho CRM, ensuring that all guest verification updates are automatically synchronized with the booking system in real time.

As part of the automated workflow, guests receive a secure self check-in portal link in the mail approximately 24 hours before arrival. Through the portal, guests can upload their identification documents and capture a live selfie for verification. The system performs identity validation and eKYC checks in the background, while the verification status is automatically updated within the Room Bookings module in Zoho CRM.

By completing these steps before arrival, guests experience a faster and more convenient check-in process, while hotel staff significantly reduce manual verification workload during peak hours. The solution improves operational efficiency, minimizes front desk congestion, and delivers a smoother and more modern hospitality experience.

Web-scraping and competitor benchmarking

To prepare competitive quotations, the hospitality sales team previously had to check pricing from multiple hotel websites manually and online travel agency platforms to compare banquet and room tariffs and prepare competitor benchmark sheets. This process usually took several hours and sometimes even multiple days. To simplify and automate this workflow, a solution was built in the hospitality vertical account using Zia Agents, Zoho CRM widgets, and custom functions to handle the complete competitor benchmarking and quotation generation process.

In this solution, the Zia Agent collects competitor banquet hall pricing, room tariffs, and package details from hotel websites, OTA platforms such as Booking.com, Weddingz.in, VenueBookings.com, and Google search results around the customer's preferred location. These competitor prices are then compared with the hotel's own pricing to generate an editable quotation containing hall rental, F&B pricing, room breakdown, taxes, and recommendation ranges.

The system automatically scrapes competitor pricing from hotel websites, reads OTA platform pricing, searches nearby hotels, compares banquet and room pricing, generates editable quotations, saves quotation recommendations in Zoho CRM, and enables sales managers to convert them into final customer-ready quotes.