Enhancing the customer experience with AI: With Wyndham Hotels’ Michael Maher

This week, Tammy sits down with Michael Mahar, SVP and Head of Commercial Technology, Loyalty and Digital Products at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. Mike started his career answering phones as a Support Technician at Wyndham and grew up through the ranks of the company over more than two decades. Today, he’s helping Wyndham transform their global infrastructure and enhance the customer experience using AI and the cloud. Tammy and Mike explore leadership, optimism and AI in hospitality.

Highlights from the episode include:

• Optimism is an advantage. Mike frames his “grounded optimism” as a growth mindset. When you look for what you can learn from an experience, it’s easier to see opportunity in challenges. He applies this to AI by acknowledging the risks while focusing on what it can do for guests, owners and team members.
• Connect the AI to the humans for best results. Mike shares the story of a woman traveling to her daughter's wedding whose flight was canceled. Wyndham’s AI-powered guest communication platform handled her frustration with empathy, escalated the issue to the front desk (who switched her to a better room) and checked back in later. It’s a perfect example of human-centric technology: the chat bot enabled an adjustment in the real world that improved the guest experience.
• Agentic AI can remove friction from travel planning and booking. AI can’t solve every problem in every industry, but travel is one space where the technology makes a lot of sense. Planning a trip to Spain used to take three weeks and a gigantic spreadsheet to coordinate. The same trip could soon be planned in a single conversation, with flights booked, tours ticketed and everything landed in your Apple Wallet.

Check out the full episode to hear more about Mike’s story, including going up for the same role as his wife at Wyndham multiple times and asking ChatGPT to read his Ireland itinerary aloud in an Irish accent.

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Please note that the views expressed in this episode may not necessarily be those of NTT DATA.