Shiji's Iceportal will now translate your hotel content with AI, into 27 or 28 languages

Shiji has put AI translation into Iceportal Content, the part of its stack that pushes hotel descriptions, amenities, photos and policies out to booking channels and travel sites.

The idea is straightforward. A hotel keeps one English master version of its content. When someone edits a room description, an amenity or a policy, Iceportal generates the other language versions from that edit, and the hotel's own team reviews them before they go out.

Shiji published the update on 20 October. The headline says 28 languages. The list printed on the same page has 27 names in it: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. Shiji says that reach covers more than 100 local markets.

Translation runs from English only. A group that writes its content in German or Spanish first has nothing to feed the feature until it maintains an English master as well.

Teams can also pin how a particular phrase gets translated and have that choice reused when the phrase comes up again. That is more useful than it sounds. Room type names, loyalty program names and brand terms are exactly the strings that machine translation likes to turn into something else.

What Shiji has not said

There is no price. The page says Iceportal offers a "competitively priced approach" and leaves it there, with no indication of whether this is included in an existing Iceportal Content contract or sold on top.

There is no rollout date or regional staging either, and the AI model behind it is described only as an "advanced AI model" with no vendor named.

What it means for operators

The review step is the part worth planning for. Shiji is clear that the AI generates and the hotel approves, which means someone on your team still signs off on 27 language versions of every policy change. For a single property that is a small job. For a group pushing a new cancellation policy across a portfolio it is not, and the honest reading of this feature is that it moves the work from translating to checking rather than removing it.

That checking matters more than it would elsewhere, because Iceportal content does not sit on your own website. It is distributed to OTAs, metasearch and travel sellers, so a wrong number in a pet policy or a mistranslated cancellation window propagates to every channel at once and is then quoted back at you by a guest. In several European markets the policy text a guest was shown at booking is the text that binds you.

Shiji also positions consistent multilingual content as groundwork for AI-powered discovery, on the argument that AI search and planning tools need clear descriptions to match against traveller questions. That is a reasonable bet rather than a measurable benefit, and nothing in the announcement quantifies it.

One practical note. If you already use Iceportal Content, this arrives in a product you are paying for and is worth asking your account manager about before you renew a separate translation vendor. If you do not, this is not on its own a reason to move content distribution.