Hotel RFP season can swallow weeks of an admin's calendar, and a new tool is promising to shrink it. Cerebri AI, a travel data specialist, has launched AIQ Studio Hotel RFP, an AI-powered platform for hotel requests for proposals. Business Travel News (BTN Daily) reported the launch. If your hotel sourcing still runs on spreadsheets and long email chains, this one is worth a closer look.

What This Means for Business Travel

The hotel RFP is one of the most labour-intensive jobs in a corporate travel programme. Someone builds the property list, sends the requests, chases the replies and then lines up the rates side by side. Much of that is still done by hand. In plenty of offices, it falls to an EA or office manager who also has a full diary of other work.

Cerebri AI's launch is part of a wider push to bring AI into sourcing, where the promise is quicker collection of proposals and easier comparison between them. It is early days. The announcement tells us what the platform is for, but not yet how it prices, how it connects to other systems, or whether it suits a smaller programme. Treat the claims as claims until you have tested them against your own process.

Travel Coordination Take

  1. Write down how your current RFP works. Note who is involved, how many hours it takes and where it tends to stall. That gives you a baseline to measure any new tool against.
  2. Ask Cerebri AI for a demo using a realistic example from your own programme. Find out what the platform needs from you, what it costs and who can see your hotel rate data.
  3. Check how it fits with your travel policy, your booking tools and your travel management company. A faster RFP is no use if the results cannot flow into how people actually book.
  4. If the demo looks promising, pilot it on one city or a small group of properties while running the manual process alongside. Compare the time spent and the quality of the comparison.
  5. Tell your finance lead or approver before you start. Sourcing changes tend to go down better when nobody is surprised by them.

Key Takeaway

If you run hotel RFPs by hand, AIQ Studio Hotel RFP is a reason to test your process, not to abandon it. Get a demo, run a small pilot and let the time saved (or not) make the decision for you.