This insight summarises When Guests Ask AI Where to Stay, Is Your Hotel in the Answer?, by Are Morch, a digital transformation coach for boutique and independent hotels, published on Hospitality Net in October 2026.
Invisible losses. AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta's Muse and Google's AI Mode already shape which hotels travelers consider. When a hotel is missing from those answers, there is no lost booking, bad review or traffic drop to trace.
The Barcelona study. Carlo Del Mistro and the Stiplo team analysed 659 accommodations and 27,360 AI travel answers across four assistants and three languages, asking each question 20 times. As presented at Skift's Data + AI Summit in London:
- Independents were 8 times more likely than chains to be completely unknown to AI. Once known, they were recommended about as often as chains.
- About 1 in 5 hotels was never recommended by any AI in any language.
- About 20% of hotels captured more than 80% of AI mentions.
- About 68% of what AI said came from guides and listicles, and about 7% from hotel websites.
- Only about 7% of recommendations linked to the hotel's own site.
AI booking favours intermediaries. Google's AI Mode launched in-chat booking with large chains and OTAs as partners, and Muse books through sites like Expedia and Hotels.com.
What moves visibility. The study found no measurable independent effect from LLMs.txt files, crawler settings, FAQ markup or schema packages. What did matter: Google review volume (the strongest single driver), backlinks and existing Google rankings, coverage in the guides AI reads, and clear answers to real guest questions.
Why small numbers still matter. AI drives under 1% of Booking Holdings room nights. But roughly a third of AI hotel recommendations come from the model's training memory, so hotels that enter it now may become tomorrow's defaults. Morch compares this to independents who ignored Google in 2008 and OTAs in 2012, then spent a decade paying 15–25% commission to win back visibility.
Recommended steps:
- Test your hotel in AI tools with the questions guests actually ask.
- Make review collection a weekly KPI built into checkout and front-desk routines.
- Pitch the local guides and travel articles that assistants cite.
- Answer common questions plainly on your website: parking, accessibility, quiet rooms, distances, late arrival.
- Add AI booking and messaging tools only after you are visible.