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It is a Big World

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Platform

Peng Yu

2022-04-06

Image of night sky

Goal:

Provide a superb guest experience that helps all of your guests maximize their potential enjoyment while on their trip by providing personally curated recommendations on what to do, when, and how.


Challenge:

To achieve this, the aspiring brand needs to build personally curated plans for each guest and each plan must account for preference, availability, crowds, weather, and transit time to name a few constraints. The understanding of personal preference, as well as the planning and deconfliction of all other constraints has, up to now, only been possible with human service agents, such as a Hotel Concierge. This manual solution makes it very costly to scale to a large number of guests.

Example Situation: Imagine you are a hotel with 413 groups of guests staying with you over the weekend at a popular leisure destination.
Specifically, you have three groups of guests that all want to have dinner at your property’s French restaurant on Friday, but only two tables are available. Given their itineraries and preferences, an experienced concierge would communicate with all of them and offer the Friday night tables to the two groups departing on Saturday. Concurrently, the concierge would make a reservation on Saturday for the third group who will be staying until Sunday, while also offering this third group a nearby dining event for Friday night, which features a Michelin chef for the cuisine that they have always wanted to taste.


Example Analysis: This solution helped three different groups achieve the best optimal experience for everyone, based upon constraints. It also required a human concierge to solve it, which means you couldn’t do it for the other 410 groups. The impact is, unfortunately, not all of you guests receive this level of service. By consequence, this also means that a large number of your guests are likely having a sub-optimal experience when they visit your property or experience your services.


Solution: Leverage a multi-agent, continuous planning solution, to automatically provide personally curated recommendations and plans that are deconflicted with various constraints.


This is exactly what Mobi Agent provides. As a B2B technology solution, Mobi Agent is specifically designed to help hospitality, travel, and transport companies provide scalable, personalized, and deconflicted recommendations for their guests. Mobi Agent is a complex planning platform with numerous data-based methods to achieve its purpose. This article expands upon three methods below for better understanding.

Relaxing Constraints to Achieve Guest Intent

Guests often have flexibility around their preferred times or locations for experiences and activities. However it can be difficult for them to adjust their schedules once they arrive due to the trickle-down-effect of coordinating changes to surrounding events and plans. This becomes even more challenging if the planning solution must account for many guests and groups.
For these large-scale problems with thousands of decision points and constraints, Mobi Agent’s AWS naitve planning solution is highly efficient. Just as the concierge in the restaurant example, Agent excels at relaxing constraints (moving 1 group from Friday to Saturday) to find the global optimum solution for everyone in seconds.


To do this, Mobi Agent takes in the preference and current itineraries of each individual guest, as well as the inventory of associated experiences and services. Then, it finds the best timing assignments for each guest to maximize everyone’s satisfaction given limited availability. Even better, Mobi Agent is constantly running, and as the plans of guests change or new inventory becomes available, Mobi Agent will continuously re-plan and update the suggestions for the guests in real-time.


Alternating Guest Recommendations to Overcome Resource Scarcity
Sometimes there is simply too much demand for a popular experience and there won’t be sufficient capacity for all guests even if we consider all of the flexibility in their itineraries as suggested above. A great example of this challenge is a popular concert that only takes place during two days, or a chef’s class that has very limited spots.


To overcome this resource scarcity challenge, Mobi Agent offers some guests alternative recommendations that align well with their preferences, possibly introducing a ‘delightful surprise’ that the guest might not have considered at all.


These alternative suggestions could be within a brand's offering, but could also be highly rated experiences the brand doesn’t directly oversee. Concurrently while it does this, Mobi Agent calculates the transportation options and existing itineraries for each guest as it presents these alternative recommendations to ensure a reliable journey and trip experience.


Replanning of Staff and Services with ML Enabled Demand Forecasting
In addition to relaxing constraints and alternating recommendations, Mobi Agent can also advise an organization when it might want to offer more capacity based upon future forecasts of demand.


In more scientific terms, Mobi Agent’s planner can treat the capacity and the underlying staff limitations as variables instead of constraints. By doing this, Mobi Agent can then solve for more cost-effective allocation of resources, based upon forecasted demand, to offer more capacity during peak demands. Further, as a AWS native solution, integration with existing solutions or datastreams is fast, secure, and reliable.

Depending on the priorities specified by the brand's operational team, Mobi Agent will automatically decide the best trade-offs between capacity increase and demand reallocation. As it does this, Agent can also produce the corresponding staff, inventory, and guest itinerary plans necessary to achieve this optimal solution. The best part? Agent runs continuously, always analyzing demand and planned resource allocation. This means from months before to near real-time (and everything in between) Agent helps organizations optimize their operational expense to maximize its revenue capture.


Summary


These three methods, when paired with the other capabilities Mobi Agent enables, empower a brand to provide personally curated service to a large group of guests, bringing concierge level service to all of your guests efficiently.


The world is big and our cities are full of wonderful experiences and surprises. There is always a better answer than ‘No’ to guests, and Mobi Agent can help your brand get there quickly.

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