Choice Hotels Hosts AI Experimentation Summit
Choice Hotels International has kicked off its 11th Mastery Tech Summit, a week-long internal event focused on AI. Teams are tasked with prototyping and testing AI solutions against real business challenges. The summit signals the hospitality industry's growing push to integrate AI into its operations and customer experience.
This year's summit involves over 800 associates from across the company, not just engineers, tasked with solving real-world business challenges. The event includes hands-on competitions like a cybersecurity challenge called "Capture the Flag" and an AWS AI league where participants rapidly build AI solutions. The ultimate goal is to develop practical tools that help franchisees increase revenue, cut costs, and operate more efficiently. Winning innovations from the summit's "Make-a-Thon" are considered for company-wide deployment, with cash prizes awarded to the top teams. A project from a previous Mastery event demonstrated tangible results. An AI-assisted approach to modernizing a legacy web system called Hotel Suite saved the company over $750,000 and significantly shortened the project timeline. Last year's winning project automated the creation of special rates for repeat guests, a tool now used by 600 hotels that has generated over $31 million in sales. This focus on internal innovation is part of a long history for the company. Choice Hotels launched the first hotel website with real-time rates in 1995, the first cloud-based property management system in 2003, and the first hotel app for iOS in 2009. More recently, the company became the first major hotelier to migrate its entire system infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2024. In 2025, it introduced Choice Maps, an AI-driven platform that analyzes data to identify high-demand markets for new hotel development. The hospitality sector's adoption of AI is rapidly growing, with the market projected to expand from $10.3 billion in 2020 to a forecasted $110.6 billion by 2031. Hotels are widely using AI for dynamic pricing, personalized marketing, and automating guest communications through chatbots.
