Cendyn wants hotels to get ahead of "OTA 2.0"

We asked Michael Bennett, Nicki Graham, and Kevin Duncan to describe Cendyn to a hotelier in two sentences. Bennett, the CEO, immediately handed it to his CMO. Graham answered: software and services that help a hotel find more guests, book them direct, and grow the revenue and the loyalty database behind it. Nothing operational, no back of house. It's the commercial side: distribution, direct bookings, digital marketing, sales and marketing.

Duncan, who runs product, made the same point. Cendyn makes hotel tech simple. The job is to take everything from digital marketing to revenue management to booking engines and the CRS, and make it less work for the person trying to reach a guest and get a direct booking out of it.

Why Europe still can't shake Booking.com

Direct booking is what every hotelier says they want, so we asked whether it's actually working. Bennett's answer split by region. In the US, book-direct has been the aggressive strategy for 15 years. He was running e-commerce for White Lodging back in 2008 and watched the shift from OTAs to brand.com take off, and it never stopped. Cendyn has US groups running 35 to 40 percent of their business direct. Outside the US it's the mirror image, a 40 to 50 percent reliance on the OTAs. He said a 40 percent Booking.com share would have got him fired by his owners when he was an operator.

So why does Europe stay hooked. Part of it is the asset mix, around 70 percent of European hotels are small independents who can't outspend Booking.com. Part of it is simpler. Bennett said Booking is a consumer drug the industry got hooked on. You want a hotel, you go to Booking.com. They trained the customer to start there, and the marketing sophistication on the hotel side never caught up. Graham says this is exactly the gap a hotel can close now, because the things that make a property worth choosing don't fit in a Booking.com snippet, and AI search might finally reward a hotel for saying them out loud.

Wayfinder, and what GEO actually means

What they released at HITEC is Wayfinder, and it's a clear explanation of GEO. A hotel writes out the prompts that matter to it, "I need a pet-friendly hotel," that kind of thing, and Wayfinder checks what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude actually return for those prompts. It scores the hotel against a competitive set the hotelier picks, and where the answer is weak, it points at why: your own website says one thing, the model is saying another, so fix your copy. Duncan calls the goal becoming the source of truth the LLMs trust.

Two details matter. It's a direct connection, not a third party in the middle, so when the model's answer and the hotel's site disagree, Wayfinder is reading that straight. And it's measurable: a health score per prompt against the comp set, which turns "be visible in AI" from a slogan into something a marketer can actually work at. For now that work sits with the marketing team inside the CMS, and Duncan said it's too early for results, since it only just shipped.

Where it's going is the part that ties to agentic AI. Today it shows you where you rank and recommends the fix. Next it makes the change and hits go, or runs on its own and reports back what it changed over the week. Same pattern we heard from Lighthouse and Canary: a tool moving from telling you to doing it.

Nobody's booking inside LLMs, and they'll say so

Cendyn wouldn't pretend the hyped version exists. We pushed hard on the scenario everyone talks about: can a guest actually complete a hotel booking inside LLMs today? Cendyn started testing it at the start of the year with AI Connect, working with a third-party direct booker, but right now it's an app you have to go into inside Claude or OpenAI. As a consumer you'd have to install something first. "And that's why we're building our own, because this isn't the future," Graham said.

A minute later she put it more simply. Are you really going to open ChatGPT and then go to a booking app inside it, when you'd just go straight to the booking. People aren't booking hotels in ChatGPT, she said, they're barely clicking out, they take the information and leave. We said that's exactly what we'd do ourselves. "It sounds nice," she said, "but it's not reality."

The thing nobody's settled

The gap we carried all week is who actually gets paid when the booking happens. Bennett doesn't think Google will jeopardise the roughly $10 billion a year Booking and Expedia spend on its advertising, and he doesn't pretend to know how that squares with sending the booking to the hotel direct. He said the same about the pace: search results changing week to week, the first page of results on its way out, the whole thing going agentic faster than anyone can map it. He's sure of one thing: it's all about content now, authentic, specific content from the actual hotel, which is worth more than SEO ever was, and which is the one thing an independent can own. Whether that's enough to win back share from the OTAs, he wouldn't guess. Nobody would.