How Wyndham scales AI to improve hospitality at 8,400 hotels

The business model for Wyndham Hotels & Resorts purposefully embraces sprawl. The hotel franchising company has about 8,400 hotels across six continents, comprising a portfolio of 25 brands, including Days Inn, La Quinta, and Ramada. But the $450 million that Wyndham has spent on technology since 2018 favors standardization and fewer vendors. “We realized years ago that it was better for our franchisees if we created an overall technology bundle,” says Scott Strickland, Wyndham’s chief commercial officer. “We have buying power because we represent thousands of hotels that allow us to get things at a lower price.” A former CIO at three organizations—Black & Decker, D&M Holdings, and Wyndham—Strickland became CCO in January 2024 to oversee all the traditional CIO responsibilities, including IT and cybersecurity, but also oversee revenue management decisions like pricing, marketing, and public relations. He has been the central figure steering Wyndham’s decade-long technology overhaul that includes lifting and shifting to the cloud, hiring and building out a centralized data team, and mandating that all properties use a centralized reservation system built by Aven Hospitality, a software-as-a-service vendor that specializes in the hospitality sector. Strickland says that these infrastructure investments have also made it easier for Wyndham to deploy generative AI features. To get feedback from Wyndham’s base of hotel property owners, Strickland formed a franchisee technology committee to learn more about their biggest technology and business priorities. They came back with a list of 72 requests, such as adding EV charging stations. Several concepts were consolidated and led to the creation of the AI-enabled guest engagement platform, Wyndham Connect, which uses AI to send proactive texts or respond to inbound guest questions, handle mobile check-ins, and allow staff to use AI-generated messaging to answer questions. “What it does for the guests is it removes friction f