How travelers now book hotels through ChatGPT, and how to get recommended

Guests who used to open six browser tabs and scroll Booking.com for 40 minutes are now typing "suggest a boutique hotel near the old town in Seville" into ChatGPT and booking whatever it names first. If your property isn't in that answer, it doesn't exist for that traveller — and no amount of ad spend changes that, because AI assistants don't run on ads.

Why independent hotels are invisible to AI assistants right now

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews all work the same way at their core: they pull answers from content that is easy to read, easy to verify, and backed up by what other credible sources say. A property website with a slow-loading photo gallery, four sentences about "luxury and comfort," and no clear answer to "do you have parking?" is content an AI system simply cannot quote. It has nothing specific to work with.

The trouble for independent hoteliers is that OTA profiles — Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor — often are well-structured and data-rich, so AI assistants quote those instead. Your property gets mentioned, but with someone else's link and someone else's commission attached to every booking that follows. The direct channel you worked to build goes unvisited.

This isn't a temporary glitch. The share of travel queries that start with an AI assistant has grown steadily through 2025 and into 2026, particularly for trip-planning questions where travellers want a shortlist, not a search results page. A quiet Tuesday in October isn't just about low season anymore — it's also about whether AI assistants even know you exist and what makes you worth recommending.

What AI assistants actually look for in a hotel website

The mechanism is straightforward, even if the technical label (Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO) sounds abstract. AI systems are trained on text. They quote text that is clear, factual, and consistent with what they find on other trusted sources. Three things determine whether your hotel makes it into a ChatGPT hotel recommendation.

One: specific, answerable content on your own website. Not "our rooms are designed with your comfort in mind" — but "our twelve rooms range from 28 to 45 square metres, breakfast is included, and we have private parking for eight cars." AI assistants can quote that. They cannot quote the first version. Every page on your site — rooms, location, policies, facilities — should read like a direct answer to a question a traveller would actually type.

Two: consistent facts across every platform. Your hotel name, address, phone number, check-in times, and amenity list must match exactly on your website, your Google Business Profile, your OTA listings, and any local directory that mentions you. When the facts differ — even slightly — AI systems lose confidence in the source and are less likely to cite it. This is one of the most common and most overlooked problems for independent properties.

Three: structured data and third-party mentions. Schema markup (the behind-the-scenes code that labels your content as a hotel, names your facilities, and lists your star rating) signals to AI crawlers what kind of entity you are. Combined with genuine reviews on Google and TripAdvisor, and mentions in local travel blogs or press, this third-party signal is what shifts you from "plausible result" to "confidently recommended." The AI needs corroboration, not just your own claims.

None of this requires an enterprise tech budget. It requires a website that is built with this in mind from the start — and someone to check whether the one you have now is doing the job.

Why you should check your current AI visibility before spending a euro more on marketing

Here is what we see regularly when we run a visibility check on an independent hotel's website: strong photography, a working booking widget, a reasonable Google ranking — and almost zero presence in AI-generated answers, because the site content is structured for humans browsing visually, not for AI systems reading text. The two are not the same thing, and most websites built before 2024 were never optimised for the latter.

The honest truth about Domani's approach is this. We run a free AI visibility check — the Domani Analyzer — that looks at your current website and tells you specifically what an AI assistant can and cannot extract from it: whether your facts are consistent, whether your content is answerable, whether your structured data is in place. No invented scores, no vague traffic projections. What you get is a plain-language picture of where your property stands in AI search right now, so you can make decisions based on that rather than guesses.

If the check reveals gaps, we build or rebuild hotel websites at a fixed price, in weeks rather than months, with the AI-readiness built in from day one — structured content, schema markup, consistent data, and an AI assistant trained on your property's own information so guests and AI systems alike get accurate answers. After 24 months, the website belongs to you outright. That is our model, and it is the same for every property we work with.

The next step is a five-minute check, not a six-month project

The fastest way to know whether ChatGPT and Perplexity can even find your hotel is to check. Paste your website URL into the Domani Analyzer and you will get a clear picture of your AI visibility in minutes — what information AI assistants can extract, what is missing, and where the gaps are likely to cost you guests. No sales call required to see the result.

If your website is already AI-ready, you will know that too. If it isn't, you will have the specific list of what needs to change — and you can decide what to do from there. Either way, you are making decisions based on facts, not assumptions, which is a better starting point than most independent hoteliers have right now.