Hotels are vanishing in AI searches - and it’s having a big impact on corporate event bookings

AI is starting to change the way we discover, research and book hotels. While it's helping streamline the customer experience, it’s not all good news for hospitality brands looking to attract corporate events.

Search has changed. With fewer people using traditional channels like Google and clicking through to hospitality websites, traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tactics alone are insufficient. 

The discoverability phase is now more likely to start in AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Claude. Our own research found that 75% of event planners are already using AI during sourcing, with the top use case being to find and select certain venues. 

If your hotel isn’t featuring in queries such as “best corporate event venues in London”, then you’re not just missing out on an additional source of revenue - you’re becoming completely invisible to people.

The AI meetings opportunity

Recognition means much less than it did before. AI may remember a user’s favourite brands from previous conversations, but it doesn’t have the emotional connection or loyalty to any brand that human consumers often do. 

And it doesn’t automatically prioritise the biggest or most familiar names. Businesses must appeal to LLMs as much as they do customers. LLMs don’t feel the emotion of a big brand campaign - they simply want to find the answers their user needs. 

This particular shift has been prominent in the group and meetings sector, where sourcing decisions have already become more digital and AI-led.

Planners now turn to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to describe what they need rather than who they want to book with. Rather than starting with venues they know and love, they’re asking AI tools to identify properties that meet a very precise number of requirements - from location and capacity to accessibility and budget. And concerningly, data shows that 94% of hotels fail to show up in AI search. 

Appealing to LLMs means understanding them. These AI chatbots and platforms are designed to identify queries and present back the most relevant information based on factors like specificity, structure and nature of the question. 

For example, an event planner might ask for a sustainable hotel in London with an event space capable of hosting 500 people. It would need to have good transport links to local tube stations and include audio-visual equipment. Pricing would also need to be available at the time of the request.

A venue that can’t clearly publish this information, even the best qualified venue, will never even make it onto this person’s shortlist. Without discoverability, it loses the opportunity to explain its value directly to would-be bookers, let alone win an RFP. 

If hospitality brands are to stay on the radar of event planners, they need to be much more specific in what they’re offering. 

Building content for AI

To continue to be discovered in the events planning sector, hospitality brands need AEO, GEO and content strategies that can answer very specific questions.

That means creating incredibly detailed and structured content that speaks the language of AI tools and the people using them. Meeting-room dimensions, capacity, floorplans, accommodation options, transport links, catering and even sustainability practices. 

A blanket statement of “we offer flexible event spaces” won’t cut it any more. Instead, a stronger description could explain that the venue offers a 400-square-metre ballroom capable of accommodating 600 people with four accompanying breakout rooms, all with built-in AV. Similarly, website descriptions should focus on the operational selling points of the venue. Anything that emphasises ease of experience for event planners will also signpost to an LLM that this is a venue it can surface confidently. The details are critical for chatbots – and these features and USPs should be discoverable and repeated everywhere: on owned sites, earned lists and partner directories. 

The wider ecosystem around a venue is critical for GEO. The more sources for a brand’s relevance to any given prompt, the better. Invest in third-party success: inspirational content about the property experience on socials and via creators, well-documented vendor partnerships and reviews. Analysis of nearly 6,000 venue listings on our own Cvent Supplier Network showed that those venues with a Diamond tier listing (our highest ranking) are 50% more likely to receive AI citations than those listed under Basic tier. 

And owned content can offer a truly rich image of a hotel to LLMs. Once your hotel has made it into the final three that an LLM recommends, elements like three-dimensional diagramming and visualisation can help customers explore a venue and find more confidence, ensuring you stand out from the other options. 

You can start to see why the second version gives both humans and AI platforms far more to work with. It’s a reflection of what we’re increasingly seeing in the consumer world. Travellers want specifics. How long is the trip from the airport? Is it within walking distance from the train station? Does it offer catering? Are there late check-in options? 

The goal here isn’t to write for machines at the expense of the people using them. The content and information provided need to be easy to understand for both.

The case for urgency

Discoverability has changed, and so has the audience for booking conferences at hospitality venues. 

But a new strategy requires new measurement. Hotels that track clicks won’t see the full story of how well their venues are being discovered and considered. In fact, thanks to AI summaries, more than two-thirds of Google searches now end without a click. The new metric for success is AI visibility. How prevalent is a hotel in LLM responses, what are the features these chatbots commonly surface, and how does that impact incremental sales?

The opportunity is not just one for large hotel chains. Independent hotels and specialist venues may not have the budgets of international giants, but they often have a lot of factors that can boost their online presence - unique settings, specialised services and unusual capabilities. If a smaller, more boutique competitor can explain its appeal more clearly, it can far outperform even the biggest and best-known hotelier. 

The next generation of success in venue booking won’t come from brand recognition, but it won’t come strictly from AI either. The key to winning bookings today is relevance, driven by venues cracking the code on how to speak to both AI and the people using it.