Hotels losing pricing control: You publish the rate. AI quotes Booking.com.

Slow afternoon at the front desk. The general manager opens ChatGPT on her phone and types what a guest would: what does a double at her hotel cost next Friday? The answer comes back in seconds, with a price. It isn't the one she loaded. Then she searches her hotel on Google. Under the name, the photos and the reviews sits a box of prices: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com. Her own website, if it's there at all, sits lower down.

She loaded her rate that morning. Neither machine asked her for it.

This is where guests now find out what a hotel costs. The answer comes from the companies that resell the room. You publish the rate. Google and ChatGPT show the OTAs' price, because the OTAs are where they look.

ChatGPT reads the OTAs

When someone asks ChatGPT what a hotel costs, it goes to the web almost every time. Nicolas Sitter, who heads AI research at the hotel data firm Lighthouse and co-founded a company that sells AI visibility tracking, captured 240 of those questions on June 25 and logged every page ChatGPT fetched to answer them. It searched in 98.8% of cases. Booking.com, Expedia and other online travel agencies made up 46% of the pages it read, more than every other kind of source combined.

It cited them far less than it read them. Only 11% of the OTA pages it fetched showed up as a link in the answer. ChatGPT takes its prices from the OTAs and gives the credit to forums like Reddit. It is one researcher's study, on one day, from someone who sells the fix.

The OTAs are also inside ChatGPT itself. Booking.com and Expedia run their own apps in it, built on OpenAI's tools, that show hotels, prices and booking links inside the conversation. Booking Holdings' chief executive, Glenn Fogel, described the plan to the Wall Street Journal plainly: when a traveler in ChatGPT wants to book, "we're right there."

And they buy the space under the answer. ChatGPT has sold ads in the US since February and in Europe since August. When SE Ranking, a company that sells search visibility tools, put 50,006 US questions to it in July, every ad it found was a single sponsored offer. In travel, Booking.com held that one seat 62.57% of the time. One vendor, one day, one market.

Google fills your box from their feeds

Google works the same way, with a feed in place of a crawl. Search a hotel's name almost anywhere in the world and a box of prices appears under it. Booking.com, Expedia and the other sites that sell your rooms send Google their prices for your hotel every day. Your own price sits beside theirs only if you send Google your rate too, through Hotel Center or your booking engine.

Until now, Google filled that gap for hotels that advertised without a feed. It found their rate itself. According to its Hotel Center help page, that ends on September 30. No feed, no hotel ads.

Miss it, and your hotel stays on Google with other companies' prices next to it. If you run on Payments by Booking.com, one of them can be the price Booking.com chose to sell at. Send the feed, and Google still decides how many prices appear and which one comes first. Feeds that fail its accuracy checks get dropped.

In the EU, Google has gone further. Since September 8, to satisfy the Digital Markets Act, its main search page shows the booking sites' prices in one block and hotels in another, without live prices. A rule written to protect hotels left only the resellers' prices on the page.

Google's AI answer books through them

In the United States, booking has moved into Google's AI answer. Since late August, a traveler can plan a trip in AI Mode, pick a hotel and pay with Google Pay without leaving the page. Google named ten partners: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, Trip.com, Choice, Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham.

No independent is on that list. An independent gets into the answer through a booking site, at the booking site's price. Beside it, Choice, Hilton and Wyndham can show a points price. A guest with a Hilton balance weighs your rate against a night that costs her nothing out of pocket.

What it means for an independent

Booking.com increasingly sets the price your guests compare against. This is how that price reaches them. The machines guests now ask treat the OTAs as the place a hotel's price lives. They read it there, show it there and book it there.

The big chains have a way around that. They have their own feeds, their own apps, and five of Google's ten partner seats. An independent has one lever left: send Google your rate, keep it accurate, and make sure your own website shows the same number. Do it. It puts your price on Google next to theirs. But Google still decides whether yours shows first or fourth, and Booking.com's price will still be right beside it.

The machines know your hotel's name. They learned its price from someone else.

Read also: Hotels losing pricing control: You set the rate. Booking.com sets the price.