This insight summarises Destination AI Highlights: What Changed in Just One Year with the Brands?, by Ben Golson, Chief Operating Officer and Partner at Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics, published on Hospitality Net in October 2026.
The shift. In 2025, "every brand was experimenting, but nobody had solved the fragmentation puzzle." In 2026, the question changed from "What could we do with AI?" to "How do we operationalize this at scale?"
Brand by brand:
- IHG moved from experiments, including robotics, to measuring AI search visibility for each hotel: about 30 custom prompts per property across several AI engines, scored red, yellow or green. A content platform captures granular attributes such as couples' spas and private plunge pools.
- Hilton went from standardising data to an AI planner across its website, app and ChatGPT, where bookings convert a few points higher. Its messaging bot handles 40–45% of incoming guest messages.
- Marriott now has a trip-planning assistant, direct booking through Google AI Mode and a ChatGPT app. Homes & Villas has been its AI search testing ground for about two and a half years.
- Hyatt talks about moving employees from adoption to "absorption," meaning actually extracting value, and plans to redesign whole workflows around agentic AI while tracking where savings or revenue show up on the P&L.
- Wyndham expanded from call-centre cost reduction into commercial work. After four years building a data foundation, it spent 10 months piloting an LLM-based platform for revenue management, marketing and sales, now used by 115 revenue managers.
- Choice is building a data catalogue, semantic layer, knowledge graphs and MCP servers as a single governed access point for AI agents. Its simplest result stood out: basic content updates reportedly lifted direct RevPAR about 3% against a control group, with larger gains at hotels with stronger guest experiences.
Not solved, but moved. Data, governance, fragmentation and ROI are still hard. But AI has left innovation and IT teams and now sits inside search, content, reputation, distribution, revenue management and the booking journey.
Why this matters for hotels. Brand AI programmes are now measured property by property. Owners and GMs should ask how their hotel scores in brand visibility checks and how complete its property content is, since Choice's 3% lift came from content updates alone.