Invisible to the AI: Mirko Lalli on Why Hospitality Is Not Ready

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Mirko Lalli, founder of The Data Appeal Company and a long-time friend. After twelve years, Lalli has stepped back from the company to take on a new mission, getting destinations and hotels ready for AI. His warning is stark. AI search is a tsunami, and it will wash away anyone who is not prepared in time. The full conversation is available to watch below.

A tsunami nobody is ready for

Lalli's view of where the industry stands is blunt. We are scratching the surface, he said, and in Europe especially almost nobody is ready. He put two numbers next to each other. Around sixty percent of travellers now use AI to plan a trip, and roughly eighty percent of the suggestions those tools return come from the online travel agencies.

The conclusion follows quickly. Destinations, independent hotels, even the chains are largely absent from those answers. To the AI, they are invisible. The booking giants are already inside the new front door, and most of the industry is not.

Getting ready is mostly about content

The fix is less technical than people fear. By Lalli's reckoning, getting AI-ready is about thirty percent technical, a logical step on from good SEO, and if you were already doing SEO well you are most of the way there. The other seventy percent is content. You have to write so that your words answer the questions people ask, and the questions have changed.

Prompts have grown longer and stranger. A search was about five words a decade ago, he said, and runs to around twenty today, often spoken aloud and far more specific. He has a name for the new behaviour, vibe travel planning. Standing in Lausanne, he made the point that people no longer search Lausanne for a set of dates. They type something like, I want to recharge somewhere cosy and Bridgerton, more intentional than transactional, with a mood attached. The work is to prepare your content and your website to answer that.

There is a twist here that suits the moment. As websites became more minimal over the past few years, they stripped out the semantic content, and the blog quietly disappeared. Now it is coming back, because the machines need exactly that kind of writing. Content, as the old line goes, is king again.

When the traffic moves inside the AI

Lalli has the data to show this is already happening. The company he built worked with more than three hundred destinations across sixty-one countries, which gave him a wide view, and those destinations started calling because their organic traffic was falling. Some, he said, are down by more than sixty percent. Even Wikipedia, he noted, has lost something in the order of 1.6 billion monthly visits over two years. People search less, and when they do search they often do not click through at all. The industry calls it zero-click, and if you are not inside the AI, you are not in the conversation.

The same shift is reaching paid media. He pointed to OpenAI opening an advertising beta to a small group of companies at a reported minimum of around 200,000 euros, which he doubts will open up to everyone soon. His read is that the engines are not yet sustainable and will have to find ways to make money, and that the disciplines will be renamed as they go. SEO becomes GEO, generative engine optimisation, and SEM becomes GEM, generative engine marketing. The current attempts at AI advertising still look priced by the click, which makes little sense in a world where nobody clicks.

Why Europe is behind

Both Italian, Simone asked him bluntly what the region is getting wrong. Lalli gave two layers. The first is European. Europe is not ready for AI, in his view, partly because of how it has regulated. The EU wrote the AI Act and recently moved to ease it and make it more accessible, which he welcomes, though he worries Europe is giving up economic ground in the process.

The second layer is Italian, and he thinks it is worse, because it is cultural. He compared it to the arrival of the internet twenty-five years ago and the long argument about whether to be online at all, except that this time there is far less time, because the pace is, in his words, on steroids. Simone reached for the law of accelerating returns to name the same thing. On top of the culture, Italy has a mass of very small businesses and hotels that are not equipped for the change, and a tech stack so fragmented that, as Lalli put it, every region runs twenty different property management systems.

Use AI for everything, leave humans for the magic

The interview closed on the HumanX theme, technology and humanity as collaboration rather than contest. Lalli's answer was the line he has been making for years. Humanity is the real superpower. Use AI for everything AI can do, automate it, simplify it, free up the time. Then leave humans for the magic, the complex relationships, the local identity, the things a machine cannot stand in for.

And there is an upside in his telling. As people grow used to AI very quickly, the scarce thing, and so the luxurious thing, becomes human connection. It is, he suggested, the next definition of luxury, and for an industry built on exactly that, it is not the worst position to be in.