Guests are increasingly asking AI where to stay. Will it recommend your hotel?
Guests are increasingly asking AI where to stay. Will it recommend your hotel?
https://hotelsmag.com/news/guests-are-increasingly-asking-ai-where-to-stay-will-it-recommend-your-hotel/
Story contributed by William Wright, head of AI & marketing innovation, DOM.
The way guests research travel and book lodging has changed. Instead of logging hours of research and opening dozens of search tabs, travelers are asking one specific question to AI models like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews, such as: “What’s a romantic hotel with the best view of downtown Charleston?”
In turn, the AI returns concise answers, usually offering three or four options that meet their travel needs, or sometimes offering only one.
According to a survey of 300 U.S. leisure travelers released earlier this year by hospitality technology firm TakeUp, 63% of travelers who have used AI for trip planning now rely on it for most or every trip, and many view the answers these bots give as a trusted recommendation, not just a starting point for research. According to the same survey, when travelers get a hotel recommendation from an AI tool they trust, 60% said they would be somewhat more likely to book it and another 23% said they’d be “much more likely.”
Unfortunately, many hotels, including quality establishments with strong service, real amenities and enviable locations, are completely invisible to this high-intent traffic. Hotels are missing these bookings without even knowing it.
Content across websites, travel publications, local guides—even reviews has become critically important to drawing your hotel into that coveted, concise AI answer.
Your Website is Still #1
The sheer volume of content that needs to be optimized to compete for visibility in AI answers can seem daunting, so start with your website. AI crawlers scan publicly available content, and your website will be the first place they look to find more information about your brand.
Many hotels build websites like digital brochures, featuring beautiful pictures surrounded by thin, generic copy. Unfortunately, an AI bot has nothing to pull from if it’s looking at a picture of a pool with the copy: “a premier destination for your leisure travel.” When it comes to website content, specificity wins, especially when AI-driven traffic is your goal. If a line in your content isn’t likely to answer a specific question posed by a potential guest, consider whether it’s adding any value at all.
If your content isn’t specific, if it’s laid out in dense paragraphs or hidden in confusing site architecture, bots—like people—can struggle to catalog it. However, if a bot has easy access to copy that says something like: “Our hotel is three blocks from downtown Charleston and within walking distance of romantic restaurants including the Peninsula Grill and Circa 1886,” it’s far more likely to return an answer featuring your hotel to the traveler who just asked for that Charleston recommendation.
Adding a well-thought-out FAQ page to your hotel’s site is an easy way to improve your odds of showing up in LLM answers. These pages offer your brand a chance to frame questions exactly the way your customers are asking their AI chatbots, and to answer them in ways that are useful to both the AI and the end user.
All Content is Potential AI Fodder
Once your hotel’s website is optimized, start looking outwards. Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews will pull information from anywhere it’s publicly available.
Start with the content you can most easily control in-house. For example, Google’s AI Overviews draws on companies’ Google Business Profile listings, so keeping yours updated with the correct phone number and hours and refreshed photos will capture that bot’s attention.
One of the trickier aspects of AI search visibility is the fact that LLMs pay attention to what third-party sources say about you online. The more third-party places where you can show up with authority, the better. Earning mentions in trade publications and tracking the way you’re being talked about on social forums is now part of the job.
Reviews feed the same systems. What guests are saying about you is now content that feeds an LLM’s understanding of your hotel and the experience of staying there.
But reviews aren’t totally out of your hands, and there are two ways you can influence how they’re being read by AI.
First, proactively ask guests directly to review your hotel, particularly guests who seem impressed by a specific amenity or service. If it’s appropriate, encourage them to name the service or amenity they enjoyed. A hotel with tons of reviews mentioning specifics like “walkable to downtown,” “beautiful gym amenities,” “delicious breakfast worth waking up for,” will show up when travelers ask about those exact things.
Secondly, your hotel should respond to guest reviews in thoughtful and specific ways. Responding with “we’re happy you enjoyed your stay” does nothing. Responding with “we hope you enjoyed our newly renovated gym amenities and our five-star-rated breakfast” gets pulled into an AI answer.
None of this requires reinventing how you market your hotel. It requires writing down what actually makes the property specific and putting it everywhere an LLM might look. Your website, your listings, the trades, the reviews. The traveler asking about a romantic hotel near downtown Charleston is doing the same research travelers have always done. They’re just outsourcing it now, and the hotels that get named in the answer are the ones that made the specifics easy to find.
Hoteliers can future-proof distribution if they break down silos and lean into data
As AI expands the number of booking channels, having good information is key
Hoteliers can target potential guests if they have the right distribution channel mix. (Getty Images)
https://www.costar.com/article/1459486304/hoteliers-can-future-proof-distribution-if-they-break-down-silos-lean-into-data
NASHVILLE, Tennessee — With the continued advancement of artificial intelligence and new booking channels emerging, hoteliers should be keen on evolving their distribution strategy to meet travelers where they are.
It comes down to knowing your hotel and the guests you're hoping to attract, said Lynsey Kreitzer, executive vice president of commercial strategy at Lark Hospitality.
"I think understanding the channel that is most profitable and beneficial to your hotel during a specific time frame is really important, and not just casting the net and hoping that all the fish go into it — being very deliberate in the channels that you are actually pushing in," she said on a panel at the recent Hotel Data Conference.
Of course, deducing which channels hoteliers should prioritize requires having the right data and knowing how to use it accurately. With tech systems that have been cobbled together over the years, that's a bigger challenge than it should be, said Linda Gulrajani, vice president of revenue strategy and distribution at Marcus Hotels & Resorts.
"We don't have a great database to be able to look at what channels are actually producing, to look at lifetime value of those customers, who those customers are," she said. "I think some of this is just creating the tech stack to be able to actually measure the distribution performance."
Unfortunately, the situation will only get worse as channel volume grows.
"I don't think channels are going away. I think we're going to see more," Gulrajani said.
AI's role and rate disparity
Even if hoteliers feel confident about how they prioritize their channels and the data insights they are using to do so, the wrench in the plan is AI and potential new booking channels. The panelists mentioned upcoming moves from TikTok and Reddit.
While social media and AI both are currently mostly used for trip planning rather than booking, that won't always be the case. Agentic travel booking is definitely on the horizon, said Philip Barton, head of product strategy and innovation at IBS Software.
"I think there is a sort of general drive that everybody wants to add more channels, and somehow that will add more revenue. But that isn't necessarily the case really anymore," he said. "It's a case of how do we fold in that additional AI channel."
For now, Gulrajani said her biggest concern is AI platforms distributing a lower rate than what a hotel's pricing strategy calls for.
"I think as AI continues to evolve and drive our distribution, it's going to make things really ugly, and we're going to have a lot more rate leakage — or whatever the buzzword is around that — if we don't get control of all of those resellers of our rates, and some of them are faulty," she said.
Gulrajani and Kreitzer agreed that having strong relationships with online travel agency partners is critical to acting quickly when the wrong rates are listed online. Hoteliers should also make sure internal rate distribution is streamlined, and corporate and in-the-field teams are on the same page, Gulrajani added.
"I'm really nervous that it's going to just hold the low rates, and that it's going to find the rate leakers, and that it's going to cause our rates to decline," she said.
While technology might be exacerbating the problem, it's not necessarily the solution, Barton admitted even as a tech provider himself.
Rate disparity "is a really a systemic issue rather than a technology issue," he said. "At the moment, we're trying to present the same offer rigorously down every channel and maintain it across there. Maybe the solution ultimately is to repackage that and make sure we're presenting different offers down different channels."
On the other hand, AI is changing internal systems and hoteliers can use it to their advantage.
"I don't think we always have to be afraid of what AI is doing," Kreitzer said. "You know, is it a little scary on the distribution side? Sure, but on the flip side, within our distribution channels, it's making some really good recommendations for our leaders so that they can be more macro and strategic and put a lot of different processes in place."
However, hoteliers need to put the right policies in place to prepare for it now since tech advancement is happening fast, Barton said.
Silos and shifting ownership of distribution
The other challenge to hoteliers' distribution strategy is internal organization, and that comes from teams operating independently, Kreitzer said.
"If you have your sales, your marketing, your revenue management, all working in separate silos, we're not seeing the grand scheme of things, and we're not selling every component of our hotel. ... So if that strategy isn't in place, all of a sudden we're on our heels, and we do have to depend on more distribution channels," she said.
But one team in particular needs to have ownership of distribution strategy, Kreitzer said.
"I do think it's a commercial aspect, and the reason is that you really do need to understand the hotel to have distribution work for you," she said. "So it's not going to be the same across every single hotel. Two hotels could be sitting next door to each other, and it's not going to be the same."
A solution to the silos problem is sharing information and data with all teams — but also making sure everyone with access to the data understands how to use it.
"The biggest thing is making sure that our teams understand the data, even if it's not all in one place — how are we collecting it, and then how are we using it moving forward, so that we can be truly successful," she said.
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