Kollective Completes Initial Data Collection for the Boutique Hotel AI Index

Kollective has completed the initial data collection phase of the Boutique Hotel AI Index, an independent research project examining how leading AI platforms recommend boutique hotels to travellers.

As AI-assisted travel planning continues to grow, hotel marketers increasingly need to understand how AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot, decide which hotels to recommend.

Despite growing interest in AI visibility, there has been relatively little independent research into how these recommendations are generated or how consistent they are across platforms within a hospitality-specific context.

The Boutique Hotel AI Index was created to help address that gap.

The completed phase covers 15 runs between 18 June and 19 July 2026, across 100 destinations worldwide, producing a dataset of 28,600 AI-generated answers from consumer-facing versions of the five platforms.

Across those responses, the study recorded:
156,074 hotel naming events
9,895 distinct hotels following entity resolution to consolidate naming variations
252,032 cited-source records across 11,811 distinct domains

The study also includes additional research arms examining regional variation, same-day recommendation stability and the impact of prompt wording on hotel recommendations.

Rather than attempting to rank hotels, the project focuses exclusively on understanding how AI recommendation systems behave, including recommendation volatility, platform differences, hotel visibility patterns and citation behaviour.

Every hotelier is asking how AI platforms decide which properties to recommend, but there is still very little independent data available. The Boutique Hotel AI Index was designed to move that conversation beyond screenshots and assumptions. By analysing thousands of recommendations using a consistent methodology, we hope to provide practical evidence that helps the industry better understand how AI hotel discovery is evolving.

Lynn Patchett, Founder and Head of Search & AI Visibility, Kollective.

Over the coming weeks, Kollective will publish findings from the research covering topics including cross-platform recommendation differences, recommendation stability, citation behaviour, geographic variation and the relationship between hotel attributes and AI recommendations.

The full methodology, together with future findings and updates, is available at: https://kollective.agency/boutique-hotel-ai-index/

Media Contact

Lynn Patchett

Founder [email protected]