This insight summarises Finding your guests in the ChatGPT data, by Martin Soler, Partner at Soler & Associates, published on Hospitality Net on 29 October 2026.
Audience clues, with limits. Soler examines OpenAI's Signals data through a hotel marketing lens. It contains no dedicated travel category, hotel demand measure or destination breakdown. Information-seeking may suggest an audience worth investigating, but it does not establish that those users are planning trips.
Match the audience to the property. His analysis highlights differences across countries and age groups. He recommends comparing a hotel's main source markets and guest demographics with those patterns before considering an advertising experiment.
Reach remains uncertain. Soler identifies missing subscription-plan data as a major limitation: a potentially relevant user is not necessarily someone an advertiser can reach. His discussion of advertising access reflects the article's publication date, rather than a verified current campaign specification.
AIHA practical takeaway. Turn an audience hypothesis into a short experiment brief. Define the guest segment, intended action, budget ceiling and review date before allocating spend. Record what would count as useful learning, and distinguish visits, qualified enquiries and completed bookings in the results. Confirm the channel's current availability and targeting options directly before launching.
Keep a simple evidence table with three columns: what the published data shows, what the hotel knows from its own guests, and what remains an assumption. Give each assumption an owner and a way to test it. Avoid treating broad demographic similarity as proof of purchase intent, or using one campaign's outcome as a forecast for every property in a portfolio.
Why this matters for hotels. Emerging audience data can improve the questions a commercial team asks. The operational value comes from connecting those questions to measured hotel outcomes and documenting uncertainty before a small experiment becomes a recurring budget commitment.