Have hotel websites become the least important part of the digital customer journey?

Hotel websites are not becoming unimportant, but they have shifted from being a competitive differentiator to essential digital infrastructure.

A beautiful website will rarely win a guest if the price parity is poor, the online reputation is mediocre, or the property is invisible on AI discovery platforms. However, a broken, slow, or fragmented website can easily lose a high-intent guest at the final step.

The strategic winning formula is moving away from continuous cosmetic redesigns and reallocating capital toward distribution efficiency, AI discoverability, unified booking experiences, and intelligent CRM automation.

If argue that websites are more important than ever because that's how assistants like Muse, Dit, Grok Bot and Instinct find and book hotels (not via API or MCP).

We're just optimizing for bots now, not humans.

Having spent nearly two decades helping owners define their marketing strategy, the real answer to this is nuanced; it depends on the type of hotel.

Now with agentic commerce, a schism is happening as follows:

(1) Heads in beds hotels / "lodging" = no need for website, only plumbing + AI agents

(2) Luxury, boutique, resorts etc / "hospitality" = website VERY important

The first camp is simpler to understand. People only need a bed in a quiet room that fits a certain location, price, brand, etc. -- good distribution, channel management and A2A (agent to agent) bookings can handle that with commerce and chain of custody happening outside of the human-facing website.

But the second camp. This is for emotional travel. Family vacations, nuptials, anniversaries, wellness, corporate retreats...

Whenever a human traveler (or travel advisor) is investing a lot of money and TIME, then the website becomes critical for conveying that feeling, giving reassurance / trust in product, and talking about the services / amenities / activities.

I'm actively helping clients play in this second camp in the age of AI whereby we are evolving websites to have agentic rails but also be more interactive and have great AI search visibility engineering.

The Digital Customer Journey is exceedingly complex - it is like a meandering river with dozens of digital touchpoints (Google claims 48).

AI platforms are now firmly among the digital touchpoints, accounting for an ever increasing percentage of travel discovery.

So how important is the hotel website as a digital touchpoint in this new AI world? 

Cloro Study: hotel sites are cited directly only about 6% of the time (mostly major hotel chains; OTAs and metasearch platforms supply around 44% of citations

Nokumo Research / Simplotel): 94.3% of accommodation websites receive zero AI recommendations across general travel queries because AI models prioritize structured data and brand authority over unoptimized sites.

So, what should hoteliers do to turn their website into an important and decisive digital touch point? 

a) invest in SEO, GEO and AEO.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) to get your property’s expertise and unique value proposition extracted in the answer boxes and AI overviews ( ex. on Google’s Gemini).

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to have your property cited in the AI recommendations (ex. on ChatGPT).

SEO - Even today, 70–80% of SEO best practices that worked for decades also work for GEO and AEO. 

b) invest in content marketing to “earn recognition” on the AI platforms 

c) invest in Online Reputation Management (ORM)

I'm not convinced about the need for constant design changes. I would have said the balance between pretty pictures and genuine functional commerce has been a drastically skewed for some time. But this is for another conversation.

I don't believe the website is any less important at the moment. In fact, I believe generally our websites are often well underdone. Much room for improvement.

However, what it must be is the absolute best location to truly understand what you are, what you have, what you can do, what you can buy and what people think. Not embellishment. Truth. Trusted.

It is a battle for trust vs. verify for the customer. If you cannot provide the best reflection of your own business who can?

As we move into the future, it will be harder for transactional style product to get the end customer to brand.com. Although, if you offer rich product and service hospitality, people will continue to visit your website. More approaches to information presentation will arise. But yours must remain the best and most authorative.

Make sure when they get there it is the honest presentation of all that you are. More importantly, that they can consume. Everything.

Hotel websites remain important, but perhaps not as much as they once did. I would not go so far as to say they have become the least important part of the digital customer journey, that would be a stretch.

For one thing, content on a hotel website is used by AI and search bots, so it's important to have key information, updated and enhanced, in order to have that "official voice" and content source available for humains and bots alike.

More importantly, the purchase funnel has exploded, so it can be expected that, at some point, potential customers might end up on your website after discovery on social media or search in IA tools. Thus, the hotel website can reassure, provide additional information, packages, testimonials and whatnot.

Having said all this, hotel marketers definitely need to also pay closer attention to social content, third party platforms (OTA, destination sites), influencer marketing, and their Google business profile. These are all pivotal for a coherent global search optimization (GSO) strategy online.

The reservation may not end up happening on the hotel website, but that doesn't mean it doesn't serve its purpose in the travel purchase decision process.

I'd actually argue that the hotel website isn't becoming less important but it's job and function is changing. Discovery has moved to maps, OTAs, social and AI answers, generative AI, no question. But many of those channels build their picture of a hotel from what the hotel publishes about itself so when an AI Overview or ChatGPT describes a property, the quality of that answer depends heavily on how clear, consistent and well-structured the hotel's own site is. In this day and age where a zero-click journey is happening more frequently, the website matters less as a destination and more as the source of truth.

Mostly yes, if you mean the website as a shopfront. A guest who chose you on Google Maps or an OTA often arrives only to check one detail, and a new homepage design does little for them.

What the site still does, and no other channel does for you, is hold your facts and your measurement. Google's AI Overviews tend to cite hotels on narrow, near-booking questions such as parking, pets, late check-in and cancellation. A dated policy page that agrees with your booking engine and OTA listings can win that citation. Where the OTA listing answers more precisely, the OTA gets the click.

GA4's AI Assistant channel only catches visits that carry a referrer, so app traffic and pasted links land in Direct, and AI Overviews visits mostly blend into organic search. Search Console's generative AI report shows impressions with no queries and nothing tied to bookings. Then the guest crosses to a booking engine on another domain, and unless an identifier survives that jump, you see the funnel as two disconnected halves.

I would move redesign money to accurate policy pages and to a booking-engine hand-off your vendor lets you instrument, then reconcile GA4 against the PMS.

Your own website is your chance to tell the story how you want it told. Not the way it is told by OTAs or reviews. It is a basis for comparison and should have the most valuable content compared to other channels. You do not want another channel to "own" that consume or content because you haven't put the effort into designing content for your target market.

While the customer begins way before they visit the website, discoverability is impacted from what can be learned on the website.

But, maybe websites have not been a true differentiator for a long time. They offer a level playing field, where a flashy UX with interesting transitions isn't as important. They can be a differentiator, if the industry improves its dynamic content and hyper-personalization based on the guest and intent versus offer spewing.

At the end of the day, I believe the website is part of the total digital footprint and ecosystem, just like OTAs, Reviews and Social.

The website hasn’t lost importance; its role has changed. It is no longer where guests discover us. It is where they validate the decision, and it is increasingly the source of truth that AI, metasearch and OTAs rely on.

For corporate, MICE and group buyers, the website rarely starts the conversation, but it can quietly end one.

I agree with your conclusion. Investment should shift from visual redesigns to what actually converts: a seamless handoff to the booking engine, rate parity, AI-readable content, intelligent CRM and a compelling direct-booking offer.

Guests don’t book websites. They book confidence.

It may seem that hotel websites are becoming less central to travel discovery. Still, I would hesitate to conclude that they are becoming less important. Their roles are evolving, especially in an AI-mediated marketplace.

As travelers increasingly rely on AI search and LLM-powered recommendations from OTAs, hotel websites can serve as authoritative sources of brand information. Accurate, distinctive, and machine-readable content on brand.com can help shape how AI systems interpret and recommend a property. Otherwise, hotels risk allowing intermediaries to define their brand narratives primarily through third-party information.

With the rise of AI search, hotel websites must now serve two audiences: human travelers and AI agents. Human-facing UX remains important for communicating brand identity, building trust, and facilitating direct bookings. Meanwhile, Agent Experience (AX) requires structured content, accessible property information, and seamless connectivity with AI ecosystems.

I would recommend hotels reconsider where their website investments create value. Instead of focusing primarily on visual redesigns or web traffic, hotels should strengthen content quality, AI accessibility, and booking functionality. The real competitive advantage may lie less in a website's visual appeal and more in its ability to influence both human decisions and AI-generated recommendations.

For a bed for the night, perhaps. For a romantic weekend away, probably not.

Where the choice is functional, a city-centre room near a meeting, the decision is often made on price and location before anyone reaches the hotel's website. There, the argument largely holds.

Experience-led properties are different. For a romantic weekend or a once-in-a-lifetime stay, the guest is judging whether this is the right place, not only whether a room is available. Pricing and reviews still matter, and both are visible inside AI answers. But AI can only describe a stay. The website still has to show it, through photography, video and the detail that lets a guest picture themselves there.

Across the hotels we work with, AI visitors are growing fast, and they reach the booking engine far more often than the average visitor. AI is the discovery layer. The website is still the closer.

That does not justify endless redesigns. Better content and a smoother booking journey may be worth more.

In the future, agent-to-agent bookings will likely take share for some hotels. For experience-led properties, the website will keep its role for some time yet, and it also partly feeds the AI engines in the first place!

The website is the one marketing asset the business actually owns that protects and demonstrates their brand. No different to the printed brochure of yesteryear. It offers direct customer connection, immersive brand experience, and a liability no third party channel can offer. If a brand chooses to be homogenous then it will take the cookie cutter digital experience, if it wants branded and better booking platforms it will invest in them.

We know not one size fits all in our industry and certainly luxury needs to protect its owned assets, while MICE sales teams need a beacon to market. Why redesign a website? Well - why bother redesigning your hotel lobby?

Websites don't need to be innovative - and we need to get away from this demand and expectation that digital must be cutting edge. It doesn't, it just has to work!

Calling hotel websites the “least important” part of the journey seems premature. Agentic shopping and booking are important and growing, but still represent a small share of activity. Hotels need to keep their web channels engaging for people who prefer them, and right now, that's most people. Websites can also serve personal agents looking for descriptive information, as well as ARI. WebMCP could extend that role by letting agents transact through the website itself.

Nor does familiarity mean websites are fully optimized. How websites look and act both influence whether travelers book directly. A well-designed site shows off the hotel’s character and offers a focused alternative to aggregators slammed with advertising and competing properties. It can retain loyal guests and convert shoppers who discovered the hotel elsewhere.

The hotel’s own site can also reward logging in with member offers, loyalty benefits, and other advantages aggregators can't match. Guaranteed room attributes, relevant packages, and on-property benefits can further strengthen the direct proposition.

We should question redesigns without a clear purpose. But there is still considerable value in improving how a website looks, works, and presents compelling reasons to book directly—for both people and their agents.

Hotel websites aren’t going away anytime soon. We tend to confuse the arrival of a new way to do something with the immediate disappearance of the old one.

Instagram continues to compete with Facebook for attention, but Facebook is still very much here. I still have friends with AOL email addresses! Consumer behavior changes considerably more slowly than technology headlines suggest.

Websites also remain the established, and usually easiest, way for hotels to present information electronically. That job becomes even more important as AI agents increasingly search for information to build responses and recommendations. Those answers need reliable sources, and a hotel’s own website should be the authoritative source for its property.

What will change is how that information gets consumed. Some travelers will browse our pages; others will encounter our information through an AI response without ever visiting the site.

That changes how we should build and measure websites. Clear, accurate, accessible information becomes as important as the visual experience.

Fewer people arriving at the front door doesn’t mean the building has lost its purpose.

Have hotel websites become the least important part of the digital customer journey? No, but the job has changed. The website’s job now is conversion, and that's where revenue lands.

Discovery happens on OTAs, maps, and AI answers. Hotel websites rarely get cited there because they aren’t good enough yet to be sourced. Most read like a brochure. That’s a content problem, but you can fix content problems.

So if you're redesigning a website, design for conversion. The guest arrives knowing the rooms and the rate. They need confirmation before they’ll book. A brochure-style site with thin content, absent information, and a bolted-on booking engine won’t give it to them.

A redesign looks different now, because AI cut out a bunch of steps that used to exist. A build used to mean email ping-pong over designer's wireframes, feedback, copy, photos, then another round. Now, with AI, I do much of that work for my clients, with copy, images, content hierarchy, user experience, and conversion optimization already built in. That’s less than half the process it was, so a redesign doesn’t take up a chunk of the budget.

Everything around it online brings the guest. The website's job now is to close the booking.