Concierges, not scouts
Every major chain has now shipped an AI product. Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt — the roadmap is uncannily similar: better search on the brand site, an assistant on the app, a smarter loyalty query. Busch's critique is that all of them are concierges — conversion tools that assume the guest is already inside the brand's front door. What the industry needs is scouts — presence on the platforms where discovery actually starts.
The architecture is aimed at the wrong journey
Guest journeys now begin on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and (soon) agentic booking assistants. Those platforms:
- Cannot be controlled by the brand
- Cannot be measured by existing attribution stacks
- Cannot be optimised for through traditional SEO alone
A brand-side AI concierge only matters after the guest has already been steered somewhere. If the steering happens elsewhere, the concierge is optimising the wrong half of the funnel.
Attribution blindness
Busch's most uncomfortable point: bookings currently logged as "direct" may increasingly originate from invisible discovery moments on external AI systems. The brand sees a direct booking; it does not see that ChatGPT recommended the property first. The consequence is that AI ROI dashboards flatter internal tools while the discovery investment case never gets made.
The Accor exception
Only Accor's ChatGPT integration meaningfully addresses external discovery — and even that is scoped to Accor inventory. The rest of the industry is investing behind a customer profile (the brand-loyal, direct-navigation traveller) whose numeric share is shrinking.
What to do
- Re-baseline AI ROI: measure incremental bookings, not journey-in-progress optimisation
- Invest in discoverability on ChatGPT, Google AI and emerging agent surfaces
- Fix attribution so external-AI origin is legible in reporting
- Format content for machines, not only for humans
- Watch who cracks external discovery first — that is the signal for the next competitive shift