All Consultants / Carly Buxton
Carly Buxton
Guest Communication & AI Strategy
Helping hospitality brands improve what guests hear and read throughout their journey--from human interactions and written communications to automation and AI.
Key Consulting Services
- Guest Communication Audits
- Guest Experience Expert Reviews
- Service Language & Brand Voice Playbooks
- Guest-Facing AI & Chatbot Communication
- AI Style Guides, Prompts & Guardrails
Expertise
Carly specializes in customer communication strategy, with a particular focus on experiential hospitality and travel. She helps organizations audit and improve the communication customers encounter—from human interactions and written communications to automation and AI. Her work focuses on making those communications clear, consistent, human, and aligned with the organization's brand voice and values. Carly combines customer research, communication strategy, and guest journey assessment to identify where a property's communication strengthens (or undermines) its positioning and guest experience. She identifies and mends the communication gaps that are difficult to see from inside an organization: where service language sounds scripted or inconsistent, automated communication feels generic, or the experience guests encounter doesn’t match the one the brand intends to create.
Background
- Carly’s journey in hospitality began at age eleven and has culminated in her current role as consultant and real estate investor with short-term rental and hotel properties in the U.S. and Portugal. From her early years at the Hope and Glory Inn in Virginia, where her mother was the landscape architect she gained a passion for hospitality. While her mother worked outside creating the inn’s cottage gardens, Carly persuaded the general manager to let her help prepare rooms, answer phones, organize reservations, and assist guests. She thought she was helping the hotel; in retrospect, the hotel was giving her an education in hospitality. Her career since then crossed hospitality, travel, research, and communication. She has worked as a Delta Air Lines flight attendant, restaurant employee, tour guide and Japanese interpreter, and Chief of Staff for a boutique travel company. At EF Educational Tours, she managed tours and supplier relationships across East Asia and Northern Europe.
Professional & Other
She teaches Business Communication at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business and is a Certified Etiquette Consultant through the International Association of Professional Etiquette Consultants.
She is the author of Unthinking Collaboration (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022) and Magnetic Communication: Speaking and Writing with Professional Impact (Bloomsbury, 2027).
Her academic training in the psychology of persuasion, identity, and communication informs her research-driven approach to hospitality.
Carly has lived, studied, and worked internationally and speaks advanced Japanese, as well as conversational French and Mandarin Chinese.
