NASHVILLE, Tennessee — How people search the internet has been revolutionized by artificial intelligence, which has major implications for how visible hotels are online in this new era.
Google, for example, integrates its Gemini AI assistant into its search engine, placing AI-generated responses at the top of search results. If that user searches for vacation destinations, a suggested trip itinerary or hotel recommendations, it's imperative that hoteliers update their websites to have a better chance of appearing in those AI responses, said Michael Goldrich, founder and chief adviser of Vivander Advisors and president of HSMAI New York.
"Now people are putting into this [search] box — instead of keywords — a question, and instead of 10 blue links, you're getting one answer, an answer that's in a paragraph, and in this paragraph could be five to seven hotels. That's it. If you're not in that list of five to seven hotels, you're invisible," Goldrich said on the "Search, AI and the new path to booking" panel at the recent Hotel Data Conference.
How well hotels appear on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or other AI tools will depend on how streamlined their websites are for search engine optimization, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization, Goldrich said. A Q&A section on a hotel's website goes a long way toward better visibility on AI platforms.
"All of you have probably heard like these LLMs really like Reddit, and the reason they like Reddit is because Reddit is question/answer, question/answer, question/answer," he said. "People are asking questions and want these AI assistants to give them answers. So you need to structure your content to address questions that your guests will have, and then [provide] the answers. ... GEO, the generative engine optimization, where it's going around and it's looking across the entire internet to look to kind of reconcile what is the best answer to give to that question. So it's looking for consistency. It's looking for entity signals in terms of what people might be wanting to look for and matching them up."
Getting better visibility on AI platforms requires a uniform marketing message, said Sam Trotter, head of digital marketing at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group.
AI is "getting information from your website, from your listings, from your reviews in your listings, from PR, from YouTube, from all these different channels," Trotter said. "... So if you tell everybody on your website that you're the most romantic hotel, and that everybody in the reviews is talking about how it was great for our kids, then that's mixed signals, right? And so you really want everything to line up."
Spending for better AI visibility
As AI functionality continues to proliferate into daily life and threaten to fully disrupt different industries, there's a clear winner in the travel space, said Scott van Hartesvelt, founder at Gcommerce. Right now, it's the online travel agencies such as Expedia and Booking.com that are way ahead of hotel companies in terms of integrating AI into their trip-planning tools.
The most aggressive spenders in this space right now are the OTAs, he said. Hoteliers are at risk of being disintermediated again in ways that may be hard to recover from as an industry.
But "the direct booking channels ... are advantaged in these platforms, and so over time if we as an industry respond collectively, I think that there's a way to still fight that fight, but we are being outspent," van Hartesvelt said.
Whether a consumer books a hotel directly on the property's website, through its brand loyalty app or via a third-party engine such as Expedia or Booking.com has historically been a bit of a headache for hoteliers. The same nightly room rate must appear on both the hotel's website and the OTA's, but hoteliers lose a percentage of that rate in OTA fees if a guest doesn't book directly with the hotel.
Now add AI to the picture and it's enough for hotel owners to demand more help from their brand partners, said Priya Chandnani, executive vice president of commercial strategy at Sage Hospitality Group. Sage is a Denver-based owner-operator with more than 60 hotels in the U.S.
"I'll say it: The brands are not keeping up at this point," Chandnani said.
It falls on owners and operators to hold brands accountable through continuous conversations, sharing best practices and pushing the brands to work it out faster, she said.
Hoteliers previously thought the rise of LLM platforms would create a more even playing ground with OTA partners, she said. That's not necessarily the case.
"OTAs are way ahead of the game; they've invested highly effectively in that space and are very well on their way to being that authority [to AI trip planning tools] for your hotel," she said.
The problem with a wait-and-see approach
There is a temptation for the hoteliers to sit back and wait to see how AI fully integrates into internet search, marketing and business operations. After all, the hospitality industry is notoriously a late adopter on most technology solutions compared to other industries. But van Hartesvelt warned that's an easy trap that leads to falling behind the competition.
"I've been through essentially four marketing technology cycles in this industry. It started with search, then moved to socials. Then I think in late [2019] and early 2020s, you had kind of the emergence of data and data privacy, and now you have AI," he said.
Initially, no one thought consumers would put their credit cards online, he said. That was a repeated refrain from clients.
Then people thought only kids were on Facebook, not paying customers who would see a hotel ad and book it, he said.
"The people who have waited for the dust to clear have consistently played catch-up, and with the speed that this is moving, that's an impossible task," he said.
Plus, the next evolution of AI tools in trip planning involves AI agents, which Goldrich said will collect user preferences from asking just a couple of questions and then book airfare, hotel and a rental car all on a person's behalf.
"I think you're going to look back on this time and realize this is just a blip because things are about to change and go much, much faster, and those are through AI agents," he said. "If you think about the process of how people book right now, they think about where they want to stay, they ask them questions, and then they act on it. ... The AI-using right now is very reactive. It's going to start to be proactive.
"It's going to know your schedules. It's going to know your affinities, your loyalty programs, and it knows that you come into Nashville, and it knows what your budget is, and it's just going to go ahead and book that [hotel] for you."