This insight summarizes PhocusWire's interview with Velit Dundar, Radisson Hotel Group's vice president of global e-commerce, conducted by Abby Crotty.
AI-native means redesign, not decoration. Dundar defines the term as rethinking the guest journey, commercial model and team workflows with intelligence, automation and data embedded from the start. In a people business, the purpose is to remove friction and repetitive work so employees have more capacity for personal service.
Price Match is the clearest proof point. Radisson's new feature detects lower rates for its hotels on online travel agencies, verifies them and matches them on Radisson's own site. It replaces a guest-led best-rate guarantee process of screenshots, claims and waiting with a real-time experience. Since launch, Radisson reports a 19% uplift in direct-channel conversion.
The results extend beyond booking. In work with Google Cloud and Accenture, generative AI automated ad creation, localization and translation across more than 30 languages in hours rather than weeks. The case study reported 22% higher ad-driven revenue, a 35% lift in return on ad spend and a 50% productivity improvement for global media teams. AI-supported recruitment has also nearly halved time to hire while retaining people for final judgment.
Agentic readiness is an infrastructure program. Dundar expects assistants to recommend hotels, compare value, check availability and eventually transact. Hotels therefore need accurate rates and policies, structured content, loyalty value, availability and technical connectivity that machines can understand.
Takeaway for operators. The pattern is disciplined: modernize the underlying ecosystem, test a specific use case, measure business outcomes and scale what works. The goal is not to deploy the most AI. It is to build trust, relevance and ease while preserving the human experience guests ultimately arrive for.