Read before the guest: Booking.com's AI answers before you can

Every hotel knows the questions. Is the parking on site? Is the room on the street side quiet at night? Can you fit a crib? Is breakfast really included at that rate? For years, a guest who wanted to know asked the hotel, by email, by phone, or through the booking site's message button, before she booked. Someone at reception answered. And a good answer was often the moment the booking was won: yes, the garage is under the building, and the quiet rooms are at the back, ask for one.

On Booking.com, that question can now go to an AI instead. Booking.com announced in October 2024 that travelers could ask specific questions about a property and get an answer straight away, generated from the listing, guest reviews and photos. The answer comes back without anyone at the hotel writing it.

Booking.com's AI has answered since 2024

The feature sits in the Booking.com app. When Booking.com announced it, it was live for travelers in the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The company said then that it would come to property pages in the near term, and to local-language versions in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Poland and the Netherlands in the months after.

Booking.com described how it works in one line: the AI pulls the relevant information from the property listing, traveler reviews and photos, and presents a short answer.

In the same announcement, Booking.com said it was testing a second tool: review summaries, which boil all of a property's reviews down to a few lines, and could later be tailored to what a traveler cares about, such as parking or wheelchair access. It said the summaries would roll out after more testing.

Three sources feed the answers. The hotel controls two of them, the listing and its photos. The reviews belong to the guests.

The answer comes from your listing and other people's reviews

Your listing is what you put into the Extranet: the facilities, the room types, the policies, the description. The reviews are what guests wrote, last month and two years ago. The photos are whatever is on the page.

The AI reads all three and writes one answer. Ask whether a hotel is quiet, and it can only use what the listing says and what reviewers mentioned. If three guests last year complained about a nightclub that closed in the spring, that can still be in the answer. If the listing never says the garage is under the building, the AI can't say it either. The same goes for the crib, the connecting rooms, the late check-in after midnight: if it isn't a field you filled in, or a line in your description, the AI has to find it in someone's review or leave it out.

Google works the same way. Its developer documentation describes AI summaries of places, written from user reviews alone and labeled "Summarized with Gemini" in the apps that show them. The only fix the documentation describes is a button to flag inappropriate content for removal. There is no field for the business to correct the summary.

So the answer your guest gets is a mix: your own words where your listing is complete, and other people's words where it isn't.

Expedia announced its own in May

Expedia is building the same thing. At its partner conference in May, the company presented two tools it calls AI Property Expert and AI Property Compare. In Expedia's words, they are meant to help people get answers faster and evaluate hotel options with more confidence.

Expedia has not launched them. Its own summary of the conference gives no date, and says nothing about where the answers come from or what a hotel can see. The only advice to hotels in the same summary is general: stronger connectivity, richer content and consistent rates help properties earn attention earlier.

When it does launch, a guest comparing two hotels on Expedia may ask the AI which one is quieter, or closer to the beach, and get one answer for both.

Your own answers reach the guest after she books

Hotels have an answer machine of their own on Booking.com, and it sits on the other side of the booking.

In October 2025, Booking.com gave hotels Auto-Reply. The hotel sets its own reply topics, and guests who write in get instant answers to common and unique questions. Booking.com says it is available worldwide.

Those answers are in the hotel's words. But they run on Booking.com's guest messaging, which opens with the reservation, so they mostly reach a guest who has already booked. The question asked before the booking, the one that decides whether she books your hotel or the one next door, can now go to Booking.com's AI.

That leaves one thing to check this week. If your hotel is in a market where the feature runs, open the Booking.com app on a phone, find your property, and ask it the five questions your reception hears most. Write down the answers. Then compare each one with your listing. Where the answer is wrong or missing, the listing is usually where it went wrong, and the listing is the one source you control.

Neither company says what the hotel sees

Booking.com's announcement says nothing about whether a hotel can see the questions guests ask its AI, or correct the answers. Expedia's says nothing either. Neither company has published how many travelers use these tools, or how often an AI answer comes before a booking.

Booking.com has also not published where the feature runs today, two years after the announcement, or whether it reached property pages and the European languages it promised.

Read also: AI now warns guests about your hotel before they book