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Choice Hotels International is accelerating its technology strategy with a new suite of artificial intelligence tools aimed at reshaping how its franchised hotels manage operations, set rates and compete for bookings across North America, Europe and other key global markets.
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A Multi-Pronged AI Push From Distribution to Daily Operations
Recent announcements and coverage indicate that Choice Hotels is rolling out AI capabilities across several core systems, combining revenue tools, group sales automation and operational support into a single technology roadmap. The initiative, highlighted at the company’s 70th annual convention and in recent industry reports, underscores a shift from pilot projects to embedded AI across the portfolio.
Among the headline additions is EasyBid, an AI-enhanced platform designed to simplify and speed up responses to group sales requests for proposals. By drawing on historical performance, rate guidelines and live demand data, the tool is built to help properties respond more quickly and consistently to group opportunities, a critical channel for urban and airport hotels in North America and Europe.
Choice is also preparing Business Direct, a self-service solution aimed at small and medium-sized corporate customers who want to book and manage stays directly on the company’s consumer site. Publicly available information shows that this will sit alongside AI-driven capabilities, allowing hotels to capture more repeat business from regional firms that may previously have booked through online travel agencies or unmanaged channels.
Together, these components illustrate how AI at Choice is being used not only to optimize prices in the background, but to reshape workflows that once relied heavily on email chains, spreadsheets and manual data entry at the property level.
RAISE and Revenue Science: Pricing Rooms by the Minute
Choice Hotels is preparing to introduce RAISE, a new AI-powered rate management tool positioned as a central engine for pricing decisions. Reports from hospitality trade outlets describe RAISE as a system that can ingest live competitor rates, historical demand, local events and broader market data, then recommend or automate rate changes across multiple channels.
The goal is to give franchisees a more sophisticated form of revenue science without requiring a full revenue-management team on site. Instead of relying on manual updates once or twice a day, properties can respond to spikes in search volume or sudden shifts in pick-up patterns, which is increasingly important as travelers in North America and Europe shop across metasearch, brand sites and emerging AI travel planners.
Analysts note that such tools are particularly relevant as real-time pricing becomes the norm in major urban markets. By centralizing rate logic and connecting it directly to the company’s reservation and distribution platforms, Choice aims to help owners maintain visibility in AI-driven search results while protecting margins during periods of soft demand.
For secondary and roadside markets that make up a large share of the Choice portfolio, automated optimization can also reduce the time general managers spend on spreadsheets, allowing them to focus on staffing, maintenance and local sales activity.
Meet CHARLIE: An AI “Teammate” for Front Desk and Back Office
Beyond pricing and distribution, Choice is introducing an AI-powered virtual assistant known as CHARLIE, positioned in public materials as a digital teammate that sits inside the company’s core operating platforms. Rather than a guest-facing chatbot, CHARLIE is designed to support hotel staff with recommendations, task guidance and data surfaced from multiple systems.
Reports indicate that CHARLIE can assist with routine activities such as generating responses to common guest messages, surfacing policy information, and highlighting follow-up tasks across shifts. Over time, the assistant is expected to learn from property-level usage patterns, helping new staff ramp up faster and reducing the training burden for managers.
This staff-centric approach reflects a wider industry trend in which AI is used to augment employees rather than replace them. In busy North American highway locations and European city hotels alike, operators are contending with labor shortages and high turnover. Embedding an AI assistant in the daily tools staff already use is framed as a way to maintain service standards while easing pressure on teams.
By integrating CHARLIE with the broader AI roadmap, Choice is effectively treating the hotel as an interconnected system, where pricing decisions, guest communications and back-office tasks inform one another instead of existing in separate silos.
Powered by Amazon Web Services for Global Scale
The company’s expanded AI ambitions are underpinned by a deeper partnership with Amazon Web Services, which public reports describe as central to how Choice is embedding intelligence across booking paths and back-end platforms. Using AWS capabilities, the group is enhancing data pipelines, model deployment and real-time analytics that span its franchised hotels worldwide.
This infrastructure focus is significant for a brand with thousands of properties distributed across North America and a growing footprint in Europe and other regions. AI models require large, clean datasets and robust compute resources; by standardizing on a hyperscale provider, Choice can roll out updates to franchisees more consistently and support features such as near real-time forecasting and anomaly detection.
Industry analysts point out that this type of cloud-native foundation is increasingly a prerequisite for hotels that want to participate fully in emerging AI travel ecosystems. As metasearch platforms, digital assistants and third-party AI agents request structured rate and availability data, brands with modern, API-driven stacks are better positioned to be surfaced and booked directly.
For owners, this architecture remains mostly behind the scenes, but it supports visible outcomes such as faster loading booking paths, more accurate loyalty pricing and fewer discrepancies between brand.com rates and other channels.
Positioning Choice in the Global AI Race for Bookings
Choice Hotels’ latest announcements arrive amid a broader shift in global hospitality, as rivals including Wyndham, Hilton and independent tech platforms bring their own AI products to market. Industry coverage over the past several months highlights a rapid move toward so-called agentic bookings, where AI systems not only recommend hotels but complete reservations on behalf of travelers.
In that context, Choice’s portfolio of tools aims to ensure its brands remain visible and competitive when guests in the United States, Canada or Europe use conversational search or AI trip planners. By coupling revenue optimization with group sales automation, corporate self-service and staff assistance, the company is seeking to influence multiple stages of the demand funnel, from initial discovery through to stay and repeat booking.
Market observers suggest that the real test will be measurable gains in franchisee revenue, booking share on direct channels and staff productivity at the property level. Early case studies shared in trade publications point to strong potential, but the rollout across thousands of hotels and diverse markets will determine how transformative the AI strategy ultimately becomes.
For travelers, many of these changes will be largely invisible, expressed through more relevant offers, smoother booking journeys and more consistent service. For owners and operators across North America, Europe and beyond, the new capabilities signal that AI is no longer an optional experiment but a structural component of how modern hotel businesses compete.