This insight summarises the Hospitality Net interview Shiji's Natalie Kimball: hotels can't outspend OTAs on AI, but they can still win on experience, recorded at HITEC 2026 with Natalie Kimball, VP of Strategic Account Management for Horizon Distribution and Iceportal Content at Shiji.
The core warning: hotels are living the same distribution loss they experienced 25 years ago with OTAs — this time compounded by AI. Kimball points to a landmark hotel that no longer controls its own name in AI search results because Booking and Expedia outbid it. If it can happen to a household-name property, it can happen to anyone.
Why OTAs are winning the AI layer:
- They've spent billions organizing structured data for machine readability — exactly what LLMs need.
- They hold specific traveller preference signals individual hotels don't see.
- They can absorb the cost of visibility. Independents can't.
What Kimball predicts:
- Mid-scale, boutique, and smaller hotels won't appear in AI-driven discovery. Only major brands will maintain visibility through the AI layer.
- OTAs will charge higher commissions for agentic bookings — similar to premium pricing for package deals — squeezing already-thin margins further.
- Last year's HITEC was the strategic window. No major operator moved decisively. The moment "passed."
The one lever hotels do control — content.
"You can't AI your way into correct content."
Hotels must populate their own sites with the specific details — room features, amenities, experiences, quirks — that AI uses when answering guest queries. Marketing prose doesn't extract. Facts do.
Two adjacent shifts hoteliers should track:
- UGC at scale becomes a trust signal. Above ~50,000 reviews, noise cancels and AI systems start treating the volume as reliable data.
- TikTok replaced the 360 tour. Short-form video is now the discovery layer that feeds booking intent — not virtual walkthroughs.
Shiji's own bet: Horizon Distribution and Iceportal Content stitch structured hotel content to live availability and rates, pulling fragmented data from as many as seven backend systems into a single coherent source that AI and OTAs can consume.
Kimball's advice to hoteliers: stop trying to compete on AI spend. Focus on what you actually control:
- Product — is the physical property what the content promises?
- Service — is the on-property delivery best-in-class?
- Content — is your own digital footprint accurate, structured, and current enough for AI to trust it?
- Inventory — is availability and rate data clean across every surface AI might read?
Bottom line: hotels can't win the AI arms race against OTAs. They can win the experience race — but only if their content, product, and service are consistent enough to survive being intermediated.