Sales & Marketing

The hotel is the company actually providing the room. If the price and conditions are the same, the AI agent should book directly with the hotel instead of through a middleman like Booking.com. Direct booking can give guests: better prices loyalty points and perks easier changes and cancellations more accurate information better customer support.

Google has already announced: they will not be the merchant of record and they're not even charging a transaction fee. Needless to say, this is a great precedent but it doesn't mean other AI platforms will follow this example.At the same time, there's nothing that prevents us from pushing AI platforms in the direction of a direct booking path integration.

I am firmly of the view that Google will eventually present all offers openly. Complementing that will be the savvier user who explicitly directs their preferred booking channel. If I am a Bonvoy member, I want to book at marriott.com to protect my loyalty assets.Right now, it's a question of structured supply.

Helping independent hotels and small groups use tech to build a healthier P&L, my bias, wishful thinking and true belief is that AI travel search is a treasure trove of untapped profitability for unique properties doing incredible things.

We're at a crossroads and this can go in either direction.And the answer depends on whether we, as an industry, do something to push it in the right direction. That's one of the main reasons why AI Hospitality Alliance exists.

As to who will benefit from AI search, it depends entirely on what hotels are willing to do. And by AI search, I mean mostly agentic search, not chatbot search. For the first time in forever, AI search via OpenAI or Anthropic will give hotels the opportunity to exploit a structural advantage (leveraging customer knowledge) that OTAs won't be able to match.

The idea that “search is dead” is mostly an exaggeration. What is really happening is a change in how people find information online, not the disappearance of search itself. For hoteliers, this difference is important because people are still searching for hotels, but the way they search and where the traffic goes is starting to change.

Traditional search isn't dying — it's disaggregating. The front-end experience is shifting dramatically, but the underlying data infrastructure remains largely the same. When ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a hotel query, it's still drawing from indexed web content, reviews, and structured data that lives in the same ecosystem traditional SEO has always served.

The world is changing, and the rate of change is exponential. Here is an example: I entered my vacation requirements for next January into ChatGPT. In about 20 seconds, I received accommodation recommendations, with options, sorted in price within my price range.