In this week’s episode of the Hotel Moment podcast, Evan Crawford, Vice President of Marketing a Pyramid Global Hospitality, joins Karen Stephens, Revinate CMO, to advocate for the use of AI in marketing and analytics, but with some stipulations. Evan reminds every hotelier that their brand, their brand voice, and their authenticity mean everything when it comes to garnering valuable trust from guests, and not even AI will replace that or the human element of the guest experience. But Evan also explains why the smartest hotel marketers know how to leverage AI to their advantage to narrow down guest segments with accuracy and make sense of large data sets with confidence.

Tune in and find out how AI can transform your tech stack to strengthen your guest relationships without forsaking what hospitality is all about — the human connection.

Meet your host

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.

Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

Connect with Karen

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Transcript

Intro – 00:04:00: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology, transforming the hospitality industry, and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.

Karen Stephens – 00:00:36: Hello and welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast. I’m your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate, and today we’re excited to have Evan Crawford, the Vice President of Marketing at Pyramid Global Hospitality with us. Evan has a wealth of experience in the hospitality marketing world with a focus on driving revenue growth and brand development through strategic marketing initiatives in his role as VP. Evan’s team focuses on the independent hotel collection known as Benchmark — which is a division of Pyramid Global — Evan brings fresh insights into what’s happening with hotel marketing and on today’s episode, we’ll dive into some of the key trends he’s seeing for 2025 how messaging is evolving in the hospitality industry and what makes Benchmark’s independent resort and hotel collection stand out in a competitive market. So I give you Evan. Welcome back to the podcast, Evan. It’s great to see you.

Evan Crawford – 00:01:27: Great to see you too. Thanks for having me.

Karen Stephens – 00:01:28: Absolutely. So, it’s been a minute since we talked. Last time we connected, we were actually live at NAVIGATE in Miami, our annual users conference. And it’s also, we’re recording this at the beginning of 2025. It’s just about a year since you started, just over a year since you started with Pyramid. So, congratulations on your anniversary.

Evan Crawford – 00:01:47: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it’s a long time with the merged company, but one year officially with Pyramid Global, I guess.

Karen Stephens 00:01:54: That’s right. As vice president of marketing. So that’s exciting. So what’s new and exciting at Pyramid as we step into 2025? What’s first on your radar here?

Evan Crawford – 00:02:03: Well, as I’m sure you know, we’re going through an adventure with Revinate. So I oversee our independent hotels, and we’re transitioning the vast majority of them. Revinate marketing and some of the other Revinate products. So that’s a huge project, and something we’re very excited about doing with you all. And that was a big kind of exploratory process in 2024, and towards the end of the year, we made the final decision and now we’re in full implementation mode. So, so very excited about the opportunities that that opens up to us. And beyond that, this is a year of we had a lot of disruption to what we do in marketing last year, the decision to move to Revinate being one of those things. And so this is a year we’re really focused on stabilization, really focused on developing our team, and connecting the dots between all of our properties. We have roughly 60 plus independent hotels and resorts, and we’re really focused on connecting the dots between our team and each individual hotel and then across the collection, making sure we’re leveraging best practices across them. So really excited about what 2025 is going to bring.

Karen Stephens – 00:03:06: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And thank you for your business. We’re obviously very excited at Revinate as well. This is a huge venture for us as well, and we’re really excited. I’m really excited as we start to implement your hotels and get everybody standardized with the communications. You and I have talked about this before, but it’s always an interesting setup when you have a management company. You’ve got a collection of independents, as you mentioned. So 60 different, 60 ish, 60 odd hotels. I know there’s a lot that’s coming in down the pipeline. But how do you think about sharing best practices across? Because they all have their own brand identity. They all have their own look and feel. How do you make sure that there’s a through line through all of them?

Evan Crawford – 00:03:41: That’s a great question because they are all so unique. But I think there are standard things that you can do. I think it’s more the ‘execution’ of those strategies where it really starts to differ. I think best practices for the most part are best practices, right? Making sure that we have a relatively frictionless booking experience, making sure we’ve got a good pre-arrival cadence, and upsell strategies, and making sure that our digital strategies are touching the right audiences and the right message at the right time. So I think all of those things are true no matter what your property is or what the features are or amenities are. And then it’s about refining the message based on each individual product to make sure it resonates with the audience.

Karen Stephens – 00:04:24: Yeah, I think that that’s bang on. And I think, and I hope I don’t want to lead the witness here, but I think part of what was exciting about Revinate for your company is that you can have hotels that are independently doing their campaigns and all of their messaging. And then you can easily share best practices because you can get in and see what’s successful and what’s not. So it’s not that you’re copycatting, but you can easily see what tactics and strategies are working at one property, and share that out with others. In a pretty consistent way.

Evan Crawford – 00:04:53: Absolutely. And also creating a little bit of a competitive environment too, right? Taking a look at what properties are really executing at a high level. What properties maybe have some opportunity for improvement. And kind of putting, especially GMs. GMs love competing with one another. So, they never like seeing a spreadsheet come out where they’re towards the back of the pack. So, giving them some motivation to up their game and compete.

Karen Stephens – 00:05:14: I love it. Let’s do leaderboards, right? Everybody loves a leaderboard, and nobody wants to be on the bottom of it. Oh, that’s great. So something we’ve been talking a lot about here at Revinate recently is that hospitality is starting to warm up to AI. I mean, obviously, AI has been around for a long time. We’ve seen it in a lot of different industries. But now in hospitality, we always lag a little bit behind in terms of adoption. We don’t want to get spooked, but we also know that AI means nothing without the data. So how are you starting to think about it at Pyramid? How are you viewing AI and especially its role in hotel technology?

Evan Crawford – 00:05:49: I really see it as a way to kind of augment or make our processes are more efficient. What I don’t want to see is us start to use AI as a replacement for human to human interactions. That scares me a little bit. Hospitality is hospitality and when someone travels to a hotel, I don’t know that they want to be communicating with the machine. I think that personal touch is something that makes traveling special, interacting with new people, new cultures, new experiences, different places. So where I do see AI coming into play is, can AI be used from a predictive standpoint to say, “Hey, we’re going to go ahead and build you a segment based on what we know about your data. So now you’re not kind of either trying to make assumptions or guess about what audience to send a message to.” This AI is telling you this audience is primed to book, or this audience is, has engaged with your spa previously, so they might be open to receiving that messaging. There’s tons of different opportunities there about how AI can use to help us do our job more efficiently, and get the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Karen Stephens – 00:07:05: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely bang on, and that sounds like you. Had a peek at a road map there. So that’s something we definitely want to get moving because I think obviously now the problem isn’t, where do I find the data? Now you’ve got all of this data, right? And it’s coming in at real time, and it’s being updated constantly from a lot of different sources. So I think you hit it on the head, right? You want humans for the interaction, for the ability to really have that sensibility about what’s going to resonate in terms of messaging, how to interact with a guest on property. But expecting humans to go through and understand the absolute best segment at the right time, even the send time of day, all of those things. Should be able to be automated and I believe can be automated. So I think you hit that right on the head.

Evan Crawford – 00:07:48: And you can really quickly get into “analysis paralysis.” There’s so much data coming at you, and then it’s like, “Okay, now what do I do?” And that’s something that scares us a little bit. We were actually just having a discussion with a potential vendor yesterday with our marketing team. And it’s like, “Okay, this is awesome.” Then when we get our hands on this data, “Okay, now how do we make it actionable?” And I think that’s true from our marketing processes all the way down to the property level, like if you’re having to manually dig through guest profiles, and dig through the guest history to understand what an individual may like or what may be appealing to them. But if AI can say, “Okay, here’s your arrivals. This guest loves cabs, and you know, or this specific line or this guest really love some sort of product that they purchased multiple times from your spa. How do we create surprise and delight experiences based on how the data can inform us?”

Karen Stephens – 00:08:44: Yes, 100%. That’s a really interesting point because the way that if you’re going to scale something, you need to be able to have the automation. I think the other thing, while you were talking about talking to different vendors and what can be scary, it’s like the worst thing that can happen for a hotel or one of the worst things. Is buying a software [00:09:00] solution and then it goes in the closet, the proverbial closet, because nobody really knows how to action the item. So it’s like, wow, this is really robust and nobody’s using it.

Evan Crawford – 00:09:09: And it’s very common in our space. Like we buy all these different. Technologies and then it’s like, well, and then we cancel them because they’re not working. But is it really that it’s not working or is it that we’re just not leveraging it to its fullest potential? And I think and probably the latter is more common.

Karen Stephens- 00:09:24: Yeah, I think that that is true. 100%. So, Evan, going back to the topic of AI, you mentioned that we never really want to lose the human touch in a lot of different ways. So obviously. When you interact with somebody on property, we want that to be human to human. But can you think of other examples of where we want to make sure that we don’t lose the humanity, where it’s obvious that AI is involved, that we really don’t want that to be the case?

Evan Crawford – 00:09:48: Yeah. Authenticity to me is incredibly important. And as AI copy and other generative AI becomes more prevalent, it seems to me that the consumer is going to start to become kind of more in tune to the, “Hey, what is written by AI and what is truly authentic?” I think that’s even the case in our own work email inboxes. I can tell almost immediately when someone has sent me an email that’s been written by AI either because I know that individual personally, or you can just start to kind of pick up on little things about the email. That’s like, that’s not quite how an average person would write an email. And it’s not necessarily that I read that, and I get mad or anything about it, but it just doesn’t feel real because it’s not. It’s just not authentic, and so I think that extends to, let’s say, our communications with our salespeople, with the clients, or even ad copy or social media captions. All of those things. I think having a more authentic voice and just being real, I think, you know, in many cases, we can be a little more casual. I think the consumer is okay with that because in most cases, they’re coming to us for a relaxed experience of some sort, so they don’t need to read five paragraphs of AI-generated copy to you know, decide to make a reservation with us. Right?

Karen Stephens – 00:11:12: Yeah, I think that that’s right. I think that it is about the human connection and I agree with you. I’ve got the same. I think we all have the same issue. We’ve got emails in our inbox that are generated that way. We actually put up a post just as an experiment for this podcast. We used AI bots, and did a whole conversation on the voice channel with two bots. And honestly, at first you’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting”, and then you’re like, “Eh, I’m not connecting to this.’ And I’m telling you, people can feel the difference. We’ve also had, you know, in terms of industry publications, and we always write all of our own content, we don’t use chatbots because of what you’re talking about, but we’ve had publications reach out and say, “Hey, Just as a general message, don’t use chatbots because we’re not digging it basically.”

Evan Crawford – 00:11:55: So yeah, we’ll see where things go, but especially when it comes to ad copy or blog content, TBD on the direction of this, but especially for these open source AI platforms, you may be getting into copyright issues at some point because you don’t necessarily know where that content or that inspiration for the content is coming from. So you could be infringing on, uh, content that’s protected. And one of the things I do think it’s useful for is — going back to my prior comment on kind of using technology to augment processes or create efficiencies — if it can be used as a thought starter, there’s a very real thing in marketing where you just have writer’s block and or you’ve been looking at the same type of promotion for six different properties, and it all starts to sound the same. So how can you use generative AI to just give you a starting point or give you some ideas that then you can build upon I think that’s really, really useful.

Karen Stephens – 00:12:48: Right. Collate all of the data, get all the talking points and data in one place, and go from there. But I think it’s safe to say that marketers, your jobs are safe. And since we’re both marketers, I think we’re happy about that.

Evan Crawford – 00:13:00: Yeah, maybe that’s why I’m so focused on the human-to-human interaction.

Karen Stephens – 00:13:04: I think so. I think this is a compelling conversation, not a chatbot. Yeah, no, I think it’s true. It’s got to be a good balance between the two. And I think if hoteliers start to think of it that way, what can we automate in terms of large data sets, things that it would take a human forever to think about? And then what do we want to keep, as you said, authentic, and that is only a human can do that, so far anyway. Okay, so you’ve worked with a variety of hotel brands. I mentioned, you know, this is year one of Pyramid having its independent, this collection, but how do you think about hoteliers positioning themselves for the next wave of travel? So especially with younger generations looking for more authentic and personalized experiences.

Evan Crawford – 00:13:48: The experience has to be at the forefront. And that’s one of the things I love about independent hotels is there’s a lot of flexibility. One of the things that we’re really focused on both at the collection level and down to the properties is how do we establish relevant partnerships with whether it’s national companies or down at the local level, you know, different experience providers or restaurants or museums. And to elevate the experience through things we can activate either at the property or getting the guests out into the community or the local environment to experience the destination. We really aim to be experience-first across our collection. The quality of a property from a heads and beds perspective in the four walls, it can vary property to property, and not everyone is looking for that Forbes five-star luxury experience, but everyone is looking for that cool spot to go grab a drink or your travel into the northeast and the best spot to get oysters or fresh lobster, and not necessarily that touristy spot that everyone goes to, but the place that only the locals know. So how can we either through partnerships or having guest service agents who just are really engaged with the local community, and they’re willing to say, “You have to go to the concierge, but a check in there” ,or just telling you, ‘Hey, if you don’t know already, you should really go check out X, Y, or Z during your stay’. So I don’t know that it necessarily has to be this transformative thing and how we deliver experiences at the hotel. But again, going back to those human-to-human interactions, it’s how do we elevate those to make sure that we’re giving the customer an extraordinary experience.

Karen Stephens – 00:15:35: Yeah, that’s bang on. And I think for Gen Z, as generations grow up, so I won’t say younger and younger, I’ll just say the next generation is coming into the buying cycle, I think that experiences are even more important, as you mentioned. It’s not just about the hotel, it’s about the surrounding area, what am I doing there? And that’s regardless of age, really, but that’s very exciting. So, Evan, as we wrap up, what is one bold goal for Pyramid’s Benchmark Hotel Independent Collection for 2025? What’s at the top, top, top of your list besides a successful revenue implementation?

Evan Crawford – 00:16:05: Yeah, this doesn’t necessarily, this seems like something that should be, standard, but across many, many independent hotels using different systems and agencies, et cetera, is something that we’re really focused on for 2025 is just bringing all of the data together in one spot. So Revinate is certainly a huge piece of that to connect those dots, but just being able to see our marketing performance and a cohesive dashboard, and just connecting all the dots between all of our properties. So we can be more actionable with our data. And not just have to go search for it in so many different places. I say that’s a bold goal just because there are so many systems that you have to connect in order to achieve that. But that’s something that we’re really focused on, and it’s going to be kind of a bear to take on, but we’re eager to make it happen.

Karen Stephens – 00:16:55: Oh, that’s great. Well, I look forward to the updates. I’m sure I’ll see you in Austin at our conference this year, and checking in throughout the year.

Evan Crawford – 00:17:03: So, yeah, you’re coming to my backyard.

Karen Stephens – 00:17:04: I know it’s exciting. You just walk over there. Well, you got to drive. It’s a little ways out.

Evan Crawford – 00:17:09: I’m very excited for it.

Karen Stephens – 00:17:11: Awesome. Great to see you, Evan. Thanks a lot. And good luck in 2025.

Evan Crawford- 00:17:15: Likewise. Thank you.

Outro – 00:17:20: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review.And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to Revinate.com forward slash hotel moment podcast. Until next time, keep innovating.