The hospitality industry is more competitive than ever.

Today, guests have access to a ton of information, making it tough to really impress them. And with so many hotels to choose from, it’s harder than ever to maintain a strong reputation.

So, how do you stand out in such a crowded market?

It’s all about offering personalized, standout experiences. Luckily, these days, we can turn to AI for help.

But let’s face it: guests are not going to get that kind of service from a robotic chatbot when booking a hotel. We’ve all experienced that frustration.

That’s why Glowing decided to take a different approach.

They use AI to support hotel operations and front desk staff, not replace them. The goal is to make staff more proactive and responsive to guests, while still keeping things personal—no cold, impersonal bots here.

With Glowing’s messaging platform, hotel staff can quickly give guests the information they need and take care of requests right away.

To bring this vision to life, Glowing had to consider a few important questions:

• How can they build a reliable RAG system that ramps up hotel staff on policies?
• How can AI best support front desk teams in giving real-time, personalized responses to guests?
• How can they make sure the AI’s suggestions are actually helpful?

Glowing’s goal was to enable luxury hotels to use AI and provide top-tier service, faster.

To make this happen, they turned to Vellum.

With Vellum’s tooling and experts working alongside Glowing, they solved AI challenges 10x faster than doing it on their own.

We caught up with Jasen Lew, CEO of Glowing, to discuss their journey—from waiting for the right AI technology to quickly integrating it with Vellum’s help.

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The hospitality industry is often hesitant to embrace AI-powered chatbots, and for good reason. Nobody wants to spend hours chatting with a bot when all they really want is a personalized and quick experience. So how does AI fit in?

Jasen explains, “Creating a unified messaging platform was just the starting point. We were looking for the right technology to help hotels operate more efficiently, and LLMs offered that breakthrough. We never viewed this technology as a replacement; instead, we saw its potential to add super powers to hotel teams enabling them to perform better  and deliver a whole new level of service.”

Glowing wanted to use AI to help hotel staff deliver great guest experiences faster than ever.

Their real-time messaging system connects with any globally and regionally popular messaging app and uses AI to suggest personalized replies for each guest. This helps increase in-stay spending, creates positive reviews, and improves the guest experience before, during, and after their stay.

To develop this feature, Glowing experimented with different prompts and models, utilizing Vellum Prompts and Workflow IDE to create a production-ready system that's now implemented by thousands of hotel staff around the world.

Once in production, Glowing’s team tracks how often AI-generated responses were edited, accepted, or replaced by the hotel staff using Vellum Actuals. They now plan to use this data to continually improve the system.

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Luxury hotels have specific standards for onboarding different types of guests. Having quick access to this information can significantly improve the guest experience.

Glowing allows hotels to store thousands of onboarding documents, making it easy for staff to quickly search and find the information they need using natural language.

Instead of digging through folders, the staff can now type something like, “How do I onboard a VIP guest from Japan, corporate level?” and get everything they need in seconds.

To make this possible, Glowing uses Vellum Workflows and Out-of-the-Box RAG option to create an advanced system that ingests and searches thousands of documents for each hotel, all while maintaining the highest level of data privacy.

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Jasen recalls that working with Vellum not only gave them the tools to build their AI system but also provided expert support that helped them learn and solve problems much faster.

“It’s definitely easier to build and iterate on every idea we have,” says Jasen. “And more importantly, we never feel stuck. If we hit a roadblock, Vellum is right there to help us.”

As Jasen points out, having the right tools is only part of the solution when working with AI. Now, more than ever, having the right expertise is crucial to solving challenges quickly.

“My interactions with Vellum have made everything 10x faster. If there’s an issue, I can talk with their team for 30 minutes instead of spending hours figuring it out ourselves,” adds Jasen.

Just think how much engineering time the Glowing team has saved.

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It’s becoming clear that in AI development, having the right tools is only part of the equation. Now, more than ever, you need the right expertise to solve challenges quickly.

With Vellum, you get both. Our tools let you experiment with prompts, build AI workflows, evaluate, move to production, and monitor your systems—all with expert guidance from people who’ve likely worked on similar use cases before.

You’ll benefit from best practices, industry-leading advice, and the level of security and privacy AI systems require.

Looking for expert AI support? Contact us here.