In May, Choice Hotels International announced a new set of AI-powered tech platforms to attract bookings and support operations at the property level. EasyBid is an AI‑powered request-for-proposal platform designed to help owners respond faster and capture more group business, while RAISE is an AI‑powered rate-management tool. CHARLIE, meanwhile, is an AI-powered virtual “teammate” designed to support hotel teams through Choice Hotels’ core operating platforms.
“What we've chosen to focus on right now is really embedding … AI into the franchising house,” Anna Scozzafava, Choice’s chief data, AI and technology officer, told Hotel Management at NYU IHIF 2026 earlier this month in New York City. “Pricing, distribution [and] labor productivity are a couple of areas that we think we can make an immediate impact on.”
Technology that helps owners and operators—particularly the small-business owners—should be “seamless,” she continued, rather than something they need to learn. “It should be just part of how they actually achieve performance improvements.”
The company, Scozzafava said, already is seeing “tangible impacts” on business, with a 30 percent reduction in response time and an increase in conversions of more than 250 basis points. “Immediate impacts to the owners in terms of generating that group and midweek business demand—that's what we're striving for today, and that's why we really spent the time and the investment around making sure that we can offer a suite of tools to the owners right away.”
Private Data
In order to maintain security, the systems keep any incorporated data internal rather than uploading it to a publicly accessible system. This, Scozzafava said, goes a long way towards generating trust between the company and the owners. “Owners want to make sure their property-level data will drive real performance improvements from a brand standpoint,” she explained. “We want to make sure that we have good governed data around loyalty, distribution [and] personalization.”
Having a closed loop for that data “creates more trust” in the accuracy, she explained, since the information can be curated and “governed” from within the system. “There's raw data, there's some curated data, and then you have [the] golden records of data—that you know every time you ask a question that you're going to get the same exact answer. We really strive to make sure that we're producing that golden record of data, if you will, because if you just go outside and you're using any [large language model], you're going to get whatever is on the internet.”
To that end, she said Choice has “full teams of people” to oversee data governance, making sure that the data is clean and trustworthy. “We create what I would call data products, so we have tight, tight control over what those actually are, and that makes us feel very good about sharing that with our owners.”
The impetus is on the brands, she added, “to make sure that we are providing—at scale and at speed—trust and data to our owners.”
Evolving
In terms of technology, Scozzafava said that Choice is focused on two priorities right now. The first, understandably, is content. “Content is really critical, so it needs to be structured the right way for it to be surfaced—so the hotels can be actually discovered—and you need to make sure that you're going to be recommended.” Choice has a suite of tools that the team uses to determine how its hotels are showing up in the LLMs and making sure that they are on par from a local market standpoint.
The second priority is partnering with major tech companies that travelers use to research and plan their trips in order to stay top-of-mind among the target demographic. “We are partnering with Google, with Anthropic, etc.,” she said. “We've got to be everywhere that a guest could be.”
From an immediate standpoint, Scozzafava sees plenty of areas where the Choice team can make smaller improvements using AI. “Step function changes when you really start to think about agentic [AI] and the workflows that that's going to create,” she said. “Nobody's actually cracked the code on that quite yet.” Going forward, she expects travelers will be able to search for and book their hotel stays in a single platform rather than searching for a hotel’s website to book. “Hotel companies are going to have to adapt to that to make sure that [they’re] discoverable and desirable and that [they’re] showing up in all of the right partnerships,” she said. “That distribution landscape is going to change pretty tremendously, I think, in the next couple of years.”