Reimagining the Guest Experience: How Shaun Lane is Streamlining Hotel Communications with Voice AI
“Your belief about your product being good enough or not doesn’t represent how good it actually is. Your product’s value is purely a function of whether people are willing to pay for it or not. You may think your product sucks, but if people are willing to pay for it, it’s an objectively good product." - Shaun Lane, CEO and Co-founder of Riviera
If you’ve ever fantasized about taking an extended travel getaway, or about racking up enough credit card points to do so for free, then you may have come across Shaun Lane.
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Shaun packed his bags and traveled the world for over two years using credit card points. He documented his experiences across two YouTube channels, The Travel Lane and Credit Card BS, which have amassed over 7 million impressions combined.
While traveling on-the-go, Shaun regularly needed to contact hotels in order to get information or change his plans. But he kept finding that he’d have to wait for ten minutes or more on the phone to get basic questions answered, even for high-end hotels.
Witnessing the rapid advancements in generative AI, Shaun knew that there had to be a better way for hotels to manage these simple queries and allocate resources. So he teamed up with two like-minded co-founders and set out to build a solution.
Introducing Riviera: The AI Phone Platform For Hotels
Today Shaun and his co-founders are building Riviera, an AI voice agent designed for hotels. By replacing traditional phone systems with AI-driven responses, Riviera allows hotels to handle routine questions instantly, freeing staff to focus on high-value guest interactions.
Labor costs represent the single largest expense item for hotel operators, accounting for approximately 42.8 percent of total operating expenses at U.S. hotels. When high-value employees are stuck trying to answer simple queries, such as “when will the pool be open?” it takes time away from meaningfully servicing guests in-person.
“Hotels hate spending money on staffing, it’s their biggest expense by far,” Shaun explains. “And their staff members are wasting time on things that aren’t actively contributing to a guest’s experience.”
By enabling hotels to automate responses to simple, repetitive questions, Riviera has helped hotels save 60-80% on call handling costs while also eliminating overtime and night shift expenses.
Riviera’s voice agent also supports all major languages, which helps international hotels service guests from across the world. “We were talking with a hotel in Bali that gets a lot of guests from China. But as they only had one employee that spoke Chinese, they weren’t able to service multiple callers at once, or receive calls off-hours.” With Riviera, hotels can instantly support international customers in any language, at any time. After launching just one year ago, Riviera is now backed by Y Combinator and is already working with major hotels across Asia, The Middle East, and The United States.
Shaun’s advice for fellow founders
As is clear from his travel experiences and the rapid growth of Riviera, Shaun isn’t someone who likes to wait around. He encourages other founders to embrace taking action and iterating along the way.
“You can just do things. Before we thought we’d have to do x,y, and z steps before anyone would consider working with us. But you just have to go out and sell with confidence.”
Shaun explains that many early-stage founders get bogged down in product development, waiting to have the perfect product before going to market.
“But your belief about your product being good enough or not doesn’t represent how good it actually is. Your product’s value is purely a function of whether people are willing to pay for it or not. You may think your product sucks, but if people are willing to pay for it, it’s an objectively good product.”
On the other hand, “you could spend months and months building something, and you could think it’s the best product ever, but if no one's going to pay you for it, then what’s the point?”
By bringing your minimum viable product to market and treating sales as a form of feedback, founders can get a more objective measurement of their product’s value.
To learn more about Shaun’s journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit withriviera.com
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