Intent, Representation, and the Future of Direct Booking: A Conversation with Aven Hospitality at ITB Berlin

At ITB Berlin, Simone Puorto spoke with Mark Hollyhead, Chief Transformation Officer at Aven Hospitality, about the changing booking journey, what it means for hotels to own their own narrative, and why the next generation of search changes everything. Aven Hospitality is rebuilding the direct booking journey as a connected, orchestrated experience, helping hotels remain visible, competitive and in control as the market evolves.

From filling in boxes to expressing intent

The conversation opened with a question about the booking journey and how much it has actually changed over the last 20 years. Mark's answer: less than it should have, until now. OTAs have done a remarkable job of training travellers to search, compare and book within their environments. That model is not going away, but it is being joined by something different.

The shift is from search to intent. Instead of filling in destination, dates and number of guests, travellers are starting to express what they actually want. A room with natural light. A property that is genuinely sustainable. A massage on arrival. The expectation, increasingly, is that the right answer comes back without the traveller having to navigate to it.

Mark drew a parallel with Netflix. The platform does not wait for you to search. It learns what you want and brings it to you. Travel is not there yet, but the direction is clear, and the underlying expectation is being set by experiences like that every day.

Brands still matter in a post-search world

One of the sharper points in the conversation was about brand. In a world where AI tools mediate more and more of the discovery process, there is a temptation to assume that brand equity becomes less relevant. Mark pushed back on that. Guests still choose based on how a brand makes them feel, and how secure it makes them feel. The onus on brands to show up well, authentically and consistently, in whatever environment a traveller is using, is higher than ever, not lower.

The implication for hotels: passive distribution strategies, where a property's information sits in cached databases maintained by intermediaries who may not be representing the property accurately on any given day, are a liability in this new environment.

MCP and the right to represent yourself

Aven represents nearly 40,000 hotels, and is actively working on MCP (Model Context Protocol) implementation to give those properties control over how they appear in AI-enabled search. The point Mark made was direct: for 20 years, a lot of hotel information online has been filtered, cached and sometimes outdated, managed by intermediaries rather than the property itself. As AI tools become a primary point of discovery, the hotels that feed their own structured, accurate, up-to-date information into that process will show up differently from those that do not.

This is not speculation. Aven is doing it now.

Ten years out: intent and expectation

The conversation ended with the inevitable question about what the booking journey looks like a decade from now. Mark framed it simply: guests will expect to be met where they are, in whatever mode they are using, with their intent understood and matched as closely as possible. Whether that is social media, a TV, a voice interface or something that does not exist yet, the expectation is the same. Information comes to you. You express what you want. The right answer comes back.

For hotels, the summary was equally clean: intent and expectation from the guest side, representation and control from the property side. Everything else is execution.