The travel industry is one where a strong argument can be made for consumers having a disproportionate impact on prevailing trends and developments – with businesses often racing to catch-up.
Over time, the tightly controlled sphere of influence that travel agents and marketers enjoyed has been broken down. Travellers now have so many diverse ways to find inspiration, research, and book their trips, and often it’s their peers who are driving their decision-making.
With the rise of AI, the grasp that traditional operators have on travellers grows looser still.
While part one of this series showed us that hoteliers are experimenting cautiously with AI tools behind the scenes, millions of travellers around the world have already made AI their first port of call when planning trips. They’re no longer starting their journey on Google or even directly on booking platforms. Instead, they’re having conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot to explore travel logistics, find hotels, create itineraries, get advice on attractions, plan activities, and more. By the time they ever click on a website, they already know exactly where they want to go and where they want to stay.
This shift is happening faster than many in the industry realise, and it has the potential to reshape the entire guest acquisition funnel. Tamie Matthews, CEO & Founder at RevenYou, put it as plainly as it can be said.
“Travellers are already using AI, whether hoteliers are ready for it or not.”
The question for accommodation providers is no longer whether to prepare for AI-driven travel planning, but how to ensure their properties are visible when these conversations happen.
In this three-part series, SiteMinder will explore these questions and more to discover the current state of play and AI-readiness of hoteliers around the world. We interviewed a range of customers and partners across global markets to capture an accurate snapshot of how AI is making its mark in a trillion dollar industry.
Welcome to part two, where we examine how travellers are embracing AI and what this means for hoteliers as they try to stay competitive in an evolving landscape.
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AI adoption amongst travellers is accelerating rapidly
AI has well and truly entered the mainstream and for travellers it’s becoming just as essential as Google and TripAdvisor used to be.
SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller report 2026, surveying 12,000 travellers worldwide, revealed that 80% of travellers now want AI-powered capabilities during their booking journey, a four-fold increase from the previous year. The desired applications in this process include price monitoring, scam detection, and budgeting advice.
Furthermore, 40% of travellers under 35 say they have already experimented with AI tools for trip planning, with itinerary planning and research amongst the most popular uses.
Does this mean hoteliers are convinced yet?
“The jury is still out on whether this is the future and something that changes everything or if it’s something that never truly transforms the world,” says Matthew Camp, Revenue and Distribution Manager at Oscars Group.
He echoes much of the caution we explored in part one, but can hoteliers afford to take a wait and see approach?
The velocity of adoption suggests this shift is already well underway rather than somewhere on the horizon. Even 48% of consumers aged 55 and older used AI for travel for the first time in the past year, indicating that adoption is spreading across all demographics.
A caveat around this, which leans into the scepticism of hoteliers, is that there is still a lack of trust from travellers in AI to get its facts straight all the time. While itinerary planning is a common use-case, travellers still get frustrated by a lack of accuracy or information and links that are simply made up.
Despite this, travellers are still experimenting – taking the AI outputs with a grain of salt to loosely discover best-value flights, identify suitable accommodation, and sound out possible destinations and attractions all in one place instead of multiple Google searches.
Regional variations in AI adoption are stark. SiteMinder’s findings show that Indonesian travellers lead at 96% openness to AI assistance, while Canadian travellers remain the most cautious at just 60%. Asian markets generally show stronger enthusiasm, while North American and older European markets are immersing themselves more slowly.
The real-world impact is growing, with AI recommendations leading to bookings
While parts of the AI equation remain a guessing game, real stories of AI-driven bookings are beginning to emerge.
“We had a reservation only last week that had been advised to book through ChatGPT,” mentions Leon Pink, General Manager at VOMO Island Fiji.
“When they put in their requirements, ChatGPT had recommended us as the best property to choose. I would like to think that it is because we have embraced AI and been ensuring that the information it has access to is accurate.”
An isolated occurrence? One tiny data point in a sea of bookings? Perhaps. But when you consider that Thibault Catala, of Catala Consulting, and Christine Malfair of Malfair Marketing, mention similar scenarios, a narrative starts to take shape.
“I started receiving a lot of booking requests from the Baltics,” he says. “When I asked them ‘where did you find me?’ They said, ‘Yeah, you started to show up on ChatGPT in the Baltics.’”
“So I do believe people are starting to use AI much more, and cutting out Google.”
These anecdotes are confirmed by Christine, who is actively tracking the growth of the influence AI is having on the booking volume of hotel clients.
“Booking referrals for hotels from LLMs is still small currently but the growth trajectory is high,” she explains.
“During March to August, which is peak season for one of my clients, we saw a 1260% growth rate.”
While the absolute numbers may still be modest compared to traditional channels, this kind of exponential growth cannot be ignored.
OTAs still have the loaded hand, thanks to integration and data infrastructure
While hotels are still deciding if and when they’ll make a dedicated play at incorporating AI strategy into their business, major online travel agencies (OTAs) are ensuring they are leading the race for traveller’s attention.
After OpenAI transformed ChatGPT into an app ecosystem, Expedia and Booking.com were among the first partners to integrate directly into the platform. This integration means that ChatGPT’s 800 million users can now research, compare, and potentially book flights and accommodation without ever leaving the conversation. This is another step forward in creating seamless traveller experiences, something that Benjamin Verot, Founder and Managing Director of HotelMinder and Lobby, views as significant.
“We saw in SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller Report that OTAs have overtaken search engines for the first time as a first point of research,” he recalls. “That means OTAs are doing a better job and it proves classic Google search is ending.”
“I’ve seen proof-of-concept apps in Claude where you can book a hotel,” he continues. “Hotels should connect their own booking engines through that, but you already have the likes of Expedia in there and they won’t leave.”
The numbers back this up. A 2025 study found that 55% of all citations feeding AI recommendations in hospitality came from OTAs, while only about 6% came from hotel websites directly.
For Tamie, this underscores a critical priority for every hotel.
“The hotel’s website and direct bookings are the biggest priority,” she emphasises. “People are going to be coming to you from AI, whether they’re using ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot. But how do you make that work to ensure that it’s your website and not Booking.com that they continue their journey on?”
“It’s also only a matter of time until AI tools store your payment details, just like OTAs, so that you can make a booking directly without lifting a finger.”
Most industry experts state that this is a matter of when, not if, meaning that hotels need to be proactive if they want to appear as a more attractive and easy booking option compared to OTAs.
Visibility strategies are irreversibly changing from search optimisation to AI optimisation
For the past two decades, hoteliers have had a blueprint for discoverability. Countless guides exist about how to improve rankings on search engines like Google, from optimising content and keywords on websites, to fine-tuning public business listings and generating positive reviews.
Now, those reliable rules and frameworks are being eroded, disbanding into something less predictable and more dynamic.
SiteMinder’s own Trent Innes, Chief Growth Officer, observes: “The hotel discovery landscape is more dynamic than it’s ever been before. Not only is the starting point of research diversifying, but travellers are moving more seamlessly between channels, often using several simultaneously to build confidence in their choices. This non-linear journey has become the natural rhythm of modern travel planning.”
On one hand, it offers a sense of freedom. Hoteliers can lean into telling unique, authentic stories without having to worry about an algorithm as much. On the other hand, it creates anxiety. How exactly do you ensure that AI tools are citing you and if they do, how do you understand exactly why?
The challenge, as Matthew points out, is that hoteliers have far less control over this new discovery mechanism.
“There can be a feeling of lacking control amongst hoteliers because they can’t guide or predict how travellers will prompt these tools, and it is hard to know exactly how to be included in LLM generations responding to queries,” he explains.
There is some optimism for hoteliers though, since many believe the playing field has been levelled with the intensity of the SEO battleground fading.
“It used to take years and constant investment into SEO to compete,” says Christine. “But now small operators just need to worry about being mentioned or cited and they have an opportunity to be discovered easier by specific and niche queries.”
Thibault echoes this sentiment saying that “People who take advantage of it now can get their market share.”
“The small gun can do what the big gun does if they do the right thing. And that hasn’t been the case for a long time, if ever.”
Hoteliers need to pay attention, with best practices still evolving
Travellers are ready and willing to adopt AI for travel planning and even booking, so what is the ‘right thing’ for hotels to do if they want to ensure travellers behaving in this way find and choose their hotel?
SiteMinder has ebooks and blogs on the topic to give hoteliers a head start, while experts typically advise a few key steps:
- Stay on top of reviews: Guest reviews have emerged as one of the most reliable sources of truth that AI systems use to validate hotel claims. Hotels need to actively encourage detailed, authentic reviews and respond to them promptly and thoughtfully.
- Focus on content quality: It doesn’t matter how long or short content is now – AI systems favor fresh, relevant, regularly updated content written in natural, conversational language.
- Website fundamentals remain crucial: This includes structured data markup (schema), consistent business information across all platforms, mobile optimisation, and clear, accessible site architecture. As Tamie emphasises, “We’ve got to be looking at the website, the content, and make sure it’s primed for people to find it.”
- Answer questions, don’t respond to keywords: Hotels should create FAQ pages that address common queries in natural language. For example, “Is there free parking?” “Is the hotel family-friendly?” “Can I bring my dog?”
- Visual content can provide important cues: AI systems can now analyse images, and properties with high-quality, professional photography that accurately represents the guest experience tend to surface more frequently in recommendations.
Hopefully, these are things that hoteliers have already been prioritising and can strengthen over time, along with other strategies that may emerge as we learn more about how AI forms its responses.
However, Benjamin admits that many hoteliers may not have the time or see the value right now.
“I’ve been a hotelier and now work with them, mostly small independents, and they’re really busy,” he acknowledges. “If there’s a massive, proven opportunity to increase revenue by investing in their website, they’ll do it. But there isn’t time to think about complex ‘future LLM demand capture’ if it isn’t there yet.”
“As an ‘expert,’ I focus on ROI. I recommend actions when I can promise good ROI. It’s not there for LLMs yet. Maybe later, but not today.”
This measured approach makes sense for many properties, but too much caution can lead to damaging delays when it comes to matching the competition. It’s well worthwhile for hoteliers to perform some experiments around how AI can help them be discovered by travellers, analyse performance, create revenue strategies, and collect key data. Maybe some ideas will fizzle out, but maybe some will turn to gold.
The gold is what we want to focus on.
In part three of our series, we’ll explore just how far AI might be able to go. How powerful can it be for hoteliers when it comes to guest acquisition, revenue management, data analysis, operational efficiency, and more? Stay tuned!
