The Bots Are Winning—And We’re Losing

If you’ve called a hotel or airline lately, chances are your first conversation wasn’t with a person. It was with a chatbot or voice bot programmed to answer questions, process simple requests, and—if you’re lucky—eventually hand you off to a human being. Hotels, airlines, banks, and even health-care providers are increasingly leaning on these digital stand-ins to cut costs and handle call volume. But for us, the customers, the experience too often ranges from mildly irritating to downright infuriating. And sometimes, it can even be dangerous.

Take Marriott’s EVA, the company’s flagship chatbot. I ran into it when trying to reach the front desk of a Marriott property in Kauai while calling from home. I simply wanted to discuss a room preference but could never get past the bot that answered my call. When I said, “Front desk,” EVA—speaking in a human-like female voice—responded, “So I can better help you, can you describe what you need in a little more detail?” No matter how carefully I responded with phrases such as “I have a question about accomodations” or “room selection,” EVA failed to understand and kept repeating, “Can you describe what you need?” After multiple tries, she eventually connected me to a different hotel. I called back and went through the same interogation once again. In desperation, I said “emergency” and finally got through.

Once checked in at the hotel a week later, I dialed the front desk from my room phone to request some towels. Suprise, it was EVA again! This time I was greeted with a 15-second privacy-policy disclosure. Then EVA once again demanded to know why I wanted the front desk. After more back-and-forth, I gave up and walked to the desk. I got my towels and some advice about EVA: The clerk advised me to repeat the same words exactly the same way twice to bypass EVA. Of course, no one tells you that at check-in. .

This is more than just bad customer service—it can be a safety issue. Requiring guests to wrestle with a bot and a endure a long privacy message before reaching a live person could be catastrophic in an emergency where every second matters.

EVA (Evolution Virtual Agent™) is the brainchild of a British company called 14AI. Its website says that EVA is “officially approved by Marriott’s Operations Technology team and is “already transforming guest engagement across a growing number of Marriott properties in Europe and North America.” I bet it is.

A headline across their home page says “Reduce calls to your front desk by 75%.” That should be an alarm for anyone in the hospitality business. It doesn’t comment anywhere about the impact on customer satisfaction.

EVA is probably very good at answering basic questions such as directions to the hotel or hours a restaurant is open, but it can never anticipate all of the possible requests it will encounter, and should never prevent a guest from reaching a human. Additionally, what they ignore is that customer service isn’t just about relaying information—it’s about empathy, reassurance, and judgment. A bot cannot bend a rule, recognize an urgency, or calm someone who’s stranded or stressed.

The truth is that Marriott’s customers are no longer its guests such as us. Their real customers are their franchisors and owners, and they are promoting the bots to lower costs and reduce headcount. But guests should never be efficiency problems to be minimized—they are the reason these businesses exist. Until companies figure that out, the smartest thing a bot could say is the only thing customers really want to hear: ‘I’ll connect you to a person.’”