Just like most other industries, in recent years, the business of hospitality has begun to integrate AI to streamline processes and make the experience of a leisurely stay more seamless for both the customers and hotels. Everything from booking a hotel room to making special requests can all be done with the click of a button. Establishments here and abroad have come to rely on LOKAL.
LOKAL is an AI-native marketing agency for hotels and ecommerce brands, with clients in the Philippines, Australia, and the United States. Agencies now come to LOKAL for the same AI systems behind ely, its service-as-a-software product for hotels — currently by invitation only.
Founder Joshua Pielago started the company in 2017, remote-first from day one — a decision that still defines how LOKAL works nine years later. The company has spent the last nine years perfecting its craft — culminating in the agency’s latest tech innovation, ely.
“By the time I started LOKAL in 2017, I’d already spent almost a decade in marketing,” shared Joshua. “Hospitality came with LOKAL — Hospitality Innovators was one of our first clients back in 2017, and they’re a client today. We didn’t pivot into AI when everyone else did. We evolved with it.”
Alongside LOKAL, Joshua worked in product automation, support systems, and AI at Uber.
“That work was about taking what people did by hand and building systems to do it,” he said. “But you have to think about how a service fits into someone’s day, how people adopt it and what happens when it needs support. That matters when you’re asking a hotel to make AI part of how it works.”
“With ely, we’ve created an AI product that brings together those years of strategy and execution. We’ve worked side by side with managers and owners to grow their businesses, and ely is the culmination of that.”
“Hotels lose money in the same four places,” he said. “Nobody can find them, inquiries go cold overnight, the front desk is drowning, and the OTAs take fifteen to twenty-five percent of every booking. ely closes those.”
Sydney and Manila
Joshua leads research and development from Sydney, where LOKAL is building the product layer, while Ramon King III — who joined as co-founder in 2020 and serves as managing director — runs services and operations from Manila. The Philippines is where ely is tested first, before it expands across Australia and Asia Pacific.
“I’m close to the day-to-day work in Manila: the clients, our team and what it takes to deliver the service. […] He’s very hands-on with the technology. […] My side of that conversation is about what a hotel actually needs and what its team can manage. We have to bring those things together. The technology can move quickly; our job is to turn that progress into a service that makes sense for the client,” said Ramon.
LOKAL has been fully remote since its inception, with people across the Philippines — Manila, Cebu, Legazpi, Baguio — and Asia Pacific. The company is very selective about who it hires and keeps a high bar. Ramon credits that, along with clear communication and accountability, for how the model holds together.
The power of ely
ely is a managed AI service, not a piece of software the hotel has to run. What a hotel buys is the outcome — the property promoted, guests answered, bookings made — not a login and a learning curve. It works from the hotel’s own approved knowledge, follows its strategy and brand, and is managed and monitored by real people at LOKAL.
Traditionally, when a hotel manager wants a promotion launched tomorrow, the process entails briefing the marketing team, collaborating with a web designer and graphic artist to design the promo, and then updating the site and creating an email. But with ely, one need only put in the brief, and the materials are produced in minutes. It can also recommend the promotion in the first place — flagging what to run before the month starts.
“It generates the images, writes the content, and resizes the assets for the materials you need, ready for printing, posting, or sending. If you want to edit them further, you can take them into Canva or other software,” Ramon explained.
And for the AI concierge, ely can detect the language of a guest’s message to the hotel’s website and remember the conversation. When the same guest calls, ely can continue the conversation in the same language as the guest’s. It then sends the inquiry to the hotel staff in English, with a translation of the discussion, so they know what was covered.
Ramon clarified that on a macro scale, ely can help hotels be more visible through search engine optimization (SEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), and paid advertising.
“The aim is to help hotels appear in search results and AI answers, attract more direct bookings and pay less in commissions,” he said.
Turning visitors into actual guests is also part of ely’s forte. When enabled for a property, ely answers questions on its website chat, Messenger, and WhatsApp. It helps move the inquiry towards a booking by asking whether the guest would like to book, sharing the booking link, and following up.
Lastly, ely helps level the playing field for hotels of any size.
“We use the same frontier AI technology used by some of the world’s biggest companies to help hotels produce quality materials and content,” Ramon said. “Putting that technology to work is still difficult for many everyday businesses. We bring it into a service they can use.”
“The model is the same one anyone can access,” Joshua added. “What it doesn’t have is nine years of running hotel marketing — knowing which promotion works in a shoulder month, which channel wastes money, what a guest actually asks before booking. That’s what ely runs on.”
That judgment has a track record behind it. Across sixteen independent properties between 2024 and 2026, LOKAL’s work cut wasted ad spend by 41%, made traffic 61% cheaper, and lifted clicks by 46%.
Uniquely service-as-a-software
LOKAL spent nine years marketing hotels by hand. ely is that work rebuilt as software — service-as-a-software, a deliberate inversion of the more familiar “software-as-a-service.” The reason is straightforward: hotel businesses pay for the marketing service, and the AI is how it gets delivered.
“We started with a service we already knew how to deliver. Then we looked at how much of that work AI could take on. So the phrase follows the way we’re building it,” Ramon said.
“More and more of what we do manually is now being delivered by AI, which means our people can focus more on what matters most: taking care of the client, working on the thinking and strategy, and reviewing whether things are actually working. With ely, you’re paying for the marketing service, and more of that work is delivered by our AI systems. The work carries on without someone having to start every task from scratch,” Ramon added.
Behind the scenes, the team at LOKAL is still responsible for what makes sense for the hotel, which includes understanding what the owner wants to achieve, helping choose what to focus on, and scrutinizing what’s being produced.
Keeping the hotel’s identity intact
With ely taking on most of the day-to-day tasks, it’s still important for hotels to maintain their identity and branding. So how does ely ensure that?
“Well, that’s the magic. Everything we do starts with what we know about the hotel, resort, or stay we’re serving. We work from the information they’ve given us, the materials they’ve used before, and what they’ve approved. That gives the AI a brief to follow and a reference for the kind of assets the client wants,” Joshua explained.
Internally, LOKAL’s team of certified AI specialists makes sure everything is up to standard. The team conducts extensive testing and evaluation to check whether ely’s output matches the brief and the client’s preferences — adding the human touch that people, especially consumers, still look for in the tech age.
ely is powered by the latest large language models (LLMs), allowing it to understand messages and respond in 58 languages across online messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Viber, as well as the hotel’s own website chat.
“Our job is to make that useful for a particular hotel. We connect the language capability with the property’s own room information, policies and offers, and the way it speaks to guests. So whether someone asks in English or Korean, the conversation should reflect the same hotel and help them move towards a direct booking,” Joshua added.
Looking for the next 100 success stories
ely is open by invitation only, starting with its first 20 clients — businesses outside LOKAL’s existing roster. Access opens to more businesses through Q4, working towards a public release in Q1 2027 across Australia and Asia Pacific.
“Our goal is to make sure we’re building the right service for hotels, resorts and stays in the Philippines,” Joshua said. “Not every business or location is the same, so I’m expecting nuances we haven’t seen yet.”
“We want to really understand the day-to-day needs of hotels, resorts and stays. There are small differences in how each property works that matter a lot to the people running it. We need to capture those as we build and grow,” Ramon added. “We’ll increase the client base slowly but surely. We’ll look at what’s working for these clients, which problems we’re helping them solve and what still needs work. That’s what should guide how we grow and what we build next.”
One of LOKAL’s earliest clients, Hospitality Innovators, Inc. (HII), continues to work with them through this expansion. John Cruz, Senior Vice President of Operations at HII, said, “Working with LOKAL has been such a delight. They provide market intelligence and actionable insights that help us make better decisions, faster. Their insights align our operations, sales, marketing, and revenue teams around a common commercial strategy, enabling us to respond quickly to market shifts and opportunities. Combined with their innovation and revenue-driving technology, LOKAL is a strategic partner in driving growth for HII and our managed properties.”
Be one of the next 100 clients to help shape ely. Join the waitlist at ely.ph.
