Making a reservation for an agent-first business model - Wyndham Hotels CEO explains why he's checking-in on an AI future

We're agent-first, and we're very proud of it.

At a time when users are looking to move beyond the proof-of-concept stage with agentic AI, customers are looking around for peer exemplars of organizations that have taken an early lead in putting agent deployment into practice at scale.

One such organization is Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, where CEO Geoffrey Ballotti can point to over 5,000 deployments of Salesforce’s Agentforce across its over 8,300 hotels. That’s only the beginning, he promises:

We are really just getting started. We're starting to roll out to Canada and Internationally. But with Salesforce tools like MuleSoft and Data 360, we have built a single source of truth, unifying all of our guests' reservation information and data, all of their loyalty information and all of their CRM data so that all our agents now are operating with the same trusted and real-time guest and hotel information, which they weren't before.

This is known as Wyndham Guest 360, he says, and it is a key enabler for Wyndham’s Agent Foundry:

It’s delivering better guest experiences and increasing loyalty engagement. It’s also, confirms Ballotti, taking millions of dollars out of operating and labor costs for the chain’s small business owners, as well as driving millions of dollars of increased revenue for these franchisees.

Humans involved

But there are human agents still alongside the AI ones, he adds:

We're in the hospitality business, and we always say it's all about humans. But it is humans [working] with agents who are driving customer success together. Think about our customers. Before our integration with [Agentforce], our agents had to spend time gathering basic guest information on who [someone] was before they checked in tonight - and that was not easily at their fingertips - or even worse, asking [guests]  for their information that we should have had.

All that has changed, he explains:

Our agents now have encyclopaedic knowledge. Think about all of your guest history, all of your booking behavior, all of your loyalty status. We tied it all together, giving us an ability to answer any question imaginable that any guest might have before they check in tonight, before their stay, in moments, not minutes. We’re booking [guests] into their preferred room based on our knowledge of your past stay history...This is all being done autonomously, which small business owners and operators would not have had time to do before.

The benefits are already apparent, says Ballotti:

It is generating so much money. We're seeing faster average speeds of answer, zero hold times. No customer should wait and that's why we're doing it. We're removing millions and millions of dollars in the front office, but we're generating millions of dollars of increased ancillary revenues to these small business owners. It's not costing them anything.

We're also seeing, which is really, really important, a 200 basis point increase in direct bookings from AI voice agents and AI voice agent conversion versus having to get those bookings through expensive third-party online travel agencies. That is increasing guest satisfaction. Our guest satisfaction scores are up 400 basis points. They've never been higher. And this customer experience that we've created is more efficient.

Data 

Wyndham is also a user of Salesforce Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, which the firm first bought back in 2024 to unlock data trapped across multiple systems and build a complete, unified view of each of its hundreds of millions of guest records and millions of bookings per year.

Having a strong tech foundation in place has helped Wyndham to pursue its wider AI ambitions, as Ballotti explained last month:

Taking a very data-driven approach with a really mature and an established Salesforce Data 360 product, we’ve been able to personalize agentic Guest 360 experiences all in one place. It centralized our reservations, our loyalty, our CRM data. The way we're thinking about it is in terms of how that is allowing our guests, in real time to answer questions and book direct, and check-in and check out.

It's early days, but he cites AI-enabled benefits such as how the organization communicates with guests, answers voice calls and messages, completing the booking, driving significant cost reductions for its call centers, and freeing up resources to re-deploy to Marketing so it can send guests availability, rates, and inventory:

By connecting direct, [we can] ensure that the data is the most accurate, the most current it could be, that our rates are always in parity for a guest who's shopping.

Beyond Salesforce, Wyndham is working with other AI tech providers, he notes:

We continue to work with public LLMs (Large Language Models), including Google AI and ChatGPT, to establish direct connections with our hotel data to eliminate the need for these models to scrape our sites. For example, in November, Google selected Wyndham as one of a handful of partners to take part in an agentic booking experience on AI mode in search. Soon, guests will be able to discover Wyndham properties through natural conversational interactions while our connected systems enable seamless direct bookings within AI mode.

And we're very excited to share that we successfully connected to Anthropic Cloud, the family of LLMs known for its emphasis on safety and human like reasoning with over 30,000,000 monthly active users. It's an early glimpse of how AI native distribution will re-shape the way guests find and book our hotels, which helps us rapidly improve the guest experience and increase direct booking capture. 

The end result:

Humans with agents, driving customer success.