This insight summarises Loyalty programs may be the one asset agents can't take by Markus Busch, editor/publisher at hospitality.today, published on Hospitality Net.
The thesis: while hotels lose the discovery layer to AI platforms, they still hold something no LLM can scrape — decades of detailed member data covering "where people go, the room they pick, what they spend." That data lives in loyalty systems, not on Google or ChatGPT.
The scale of the moat:
- Marriott Bonvoy — 283 million members (43M added in 2025)
- Hilton Honors — 200M+ members
- World of Hyatt — 63M members, up 19% YoY
What AI agents actually need to close a booking: guest preferences, previous stays, tier status, rate entitlements, and payment methods on file. All of that lives inside brand loyalty systems — not in public web data.
Chains are already tooling for the agentic era.
- IHG is building a unified loyalty/CRM platform on Salesforce with AI capabilities launching in 2026.
- Hyatt has deployed four internal agentic AI systems and private-cloud infrastructure supporting multiple LLMs, and is preparing direct AI-to-AI negotiation between its brand systems and corporate travel planners' agents.
The strategic split: hotels can lose control of discovery and still hold the booking moment — because agents will need to pull loyalty data to complete transactions. That keeps the brand in the loop as an active data source, not a passive listing.
But the moat isn't guaranteed. Busch flags two futures: agents keep requesting hotel-side data (hotels stay essential), or agents observe billions of bookings and build their own preference models (hotels become obsolete). The window to lock in structural leverage is now.
Practical takeaways for hoteliers:
- Treat your loyalty database as strategic infrastructure, not a marketing list.
- Invest in data quality — completeness of preferences, spend history, and payment tokens is what makes the moat defensible.
- Prepare for AI-to-AI interfaces: your systems will need to serve agentic requests securely and at scale.
Bottom line: loyalty was accidentally built into the one asset platforms can't easily commandeer. Whether hotels turn that accident into durable leverage depends on how quickly they operationalize it.