MARA Solutions co-founder Maximilian Lüders on how AI is transforming guest feedback from a reputation management task into a powerful tool for smarter hotel decisions, stronger operations and greater guest satisfaction.
When founding MARA, what gap did you originally set out to solve, and how has MARA’s proposition developed in response to what hoteliers need today?
The original idea behind MARA Solutions came from a simple observation: public reviews contain an enormous amount of knowledge, and almost nobody was using it properly. Hotels were spending hours every week writing responses and getting very little back beyond a score. Reviews were treated as a checkbox: respond, report, move on. But guests were telling hotels what to fix.
So, the first gap was straightforward: help hotels write better responses, faster. Responding is the entry point. The real value is understanding feedback and making decisions with it. Today, MARA is a guest intelligence platform that helps hoteliers act on the feedback they receive, without the heavy lifting of uncovering the insights within it.
Hotels collect huge volumes of guest feedback across reviews, surveys and other channels, but turning that information into meaningful action can be challenging. How can hoteliers move beyond simply responding to reviews and use guest feedback as a tool to identify operational issues, improve service and ultimately drive guest satisfaction?
The problem is rarely a lack of data. The difficulty is understanding what is actually relevant. Knowing that “rooms” scored badly gets you nowhere. Knowing self-check-in machines that don’t work cost you 0.13 stars is the game changer.
Guests may constantly complain about slow check-in, but those reviews barely sit below the property’s average. A smaller number mention noise between rooms, but sit far below average. The second issue is mentioned less but costs more.
It becomes even more precise when you connect reviews to reservation data. You are no longer looking at “noise complaints”; you are looking at room 106. That is a maintenance decision someone can act on this week, or evidence a GM can use to justify an investment to an owner.
There is understandably still some hesitation around using AI in areas of hospitality that require a personal, human touch. How do you ensure AI-generated responses remain authentic to a hotel’s brand voice, and where do you believe the human element remains essential?
AI should not mean every hotel suddenly sounds the same. With MARA, a hotel builds its Brand Voice from how it already communicates – including tone, greetings and terminology, automatically informed by previous communication. Smart Snippets then capture what is specific to that property, such as the standard response to a loud room facing the street.
Brand Voice controls how you sound. Smart Snippets control what your property needs guests to know.
What AI takes away is repetitive work, not judgement. When a situation needs a person, a person makes the call.
Looking ahead, what do you think will be the biggest opportunity for AI within hotel reputation management and guest intelligence in the future, and how can hoteliers take advantage of it?
Guests will increasingly ask AI assistants and search tools where to stay. That changes what reputation management means. It is no longer simply “reply to your reviews”. Managing your reputation means being found and recommended in AI search. We are testing this with our AI Visibility Tracker, which shows how often AI assistants recommend a hotel. This shift is part of the broader picture of the hotel of tomorrow.
What hoteliers should do now is closer to SEO than people might expect. Keep OTA, Google and review profiles consistent. Build pages for searches you should win, such as “dog-friendly hotel in Rome”. Keep managing reviews, because that is where trustworthy quality signals live.
A website can claim a rich breakfast buffet. Reviews tell AI whether it was any good. The gap between what you claim and what guests experience is about to become machine-readable. You cannot SEO your way around a bad breakfast.