A Hotel’s Guide to the AI Age of Paid Advertising

Continuing my Hotel Commercial AI Optimization series, let’s talk about paid media. (I hope you have already read my post about websites.) Specifically: what happens to your Google Ads, Meta, and Programmatic budgets now that AI dominates the traveler’s trip-planning journey?

Spoiler: Some of your budget is working harder than ever. The rest is very quietly on fire! Grab a caffeinated drink if you like, and let’s dive in. You will really want to pay attention to this.

The Scary Numbers Agencies Are Not Putting in Your Monthly Report

Let’s start by understanding the seismic shift happening in the paid media landscape. You are likely not seeing much about this in your marketing agency’s beautifully formatted monthly slide deck. But the hotel paid media times, they are a-changing.

Alarm bells started ringing for large-scale paid media advertisers in 2025. Why? Click-through rates (CTR) for ads were collapsing. CTR has long been a crucial cornerstone metric for measuring the effectiveness of paid media campaigns, and it was imploding fast.

Seer Interactive tracked 25.1 million impressions across 3,119 queries over 15 months and found that:

  • CTR on queries where Google’s AI Overviews appear has fallen 68% from baseline.
  • Paid CTR dropped from 19.70% in June 2024 to 6.34% in September 2025.
  • July 2025 was particularly brutal: CTR dropped from 11% to 3%.

Now, your agency might not be necessarily hiding this data from you. At the same time, they are likely not volunteering information that makes their monthly retainer across hundreds of hotels look bad. 

Behold the Era of Zero-Click Search

Brace yourselves. Zero-click search is not just coming… it is already here!

According to SparkToro and Similarweb research, approximately 58.5% of U.S. Google searches now end without a single click to any external website. Since Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024, that number has accelerated quickly. Similarweb tracked a 13-percentage-point jump in zero-click searches in a single year. On mobile, it is way worse: zero-click rates are hitting 77% versus 47% on desktop, and as we know hotel searches skew heavily on mobile. Impressions (the number of times your ad is shown) stay high but clicks have stopped following them. 

This trend is very clearly visible in most Google Search Console dashboards right now. The real story for hotel marketers and owners is not the absolute number. It is the rapid speed of change.

Meanwhile your hotel’s cost per click (CPC) likely has not dropped, despite its more limited effectiveness. Why? Well, this is because as organic real estate shrinks, more advertisers compete for fewer and more expensive placements. This is how auction math works in Google Ads. Remember, Google is the house and the house always wins. 

A (not so) New Sheriff Arrives in Advertising Town!

The biggest news that changes things for hotels? Meta (Facebook/Instagram, also nostalgically referred to as “The Facebook” by me) is forecasted to overtake Google in global ad revenue in 2026, hitting $243 billion versus Google’s $239 billion (eMarketer).

Google’s growth is slowing to 11.9% while Meta’s is accelerating to 24.1%!  The market is repricing in real time and that tells you exactly where the leverage is moving when it comes to AI. Hotels need to pay some extra attention to the new king… until it eventually has to give up the throne.

Hotel Paid Media Channels: Deep Dive

I hope your caffeine is kicking in by now! Let’s now review specific channels to see what is changing for hotels and, more importantly, what you can do to improve your digital marketing strategy.

1. Google Advertising

Google has been steadily infusing AI into its ad products for years. They are shifting the model from keyword-centric to intent-centric. Here is what’s new in Google and how you can use it to benefit your hotel.

A. AI Overviews: New Landlord at the Top of the Funnel
Google’s AI Overviews now appear on roughly 13% of all U.S. desktop queries (SEMrush) and are far more likely to trigger with longer, more conversational searches. “Boutique hotels in Los Angeles with a cool bar” is exactly the kind of query that now gets you an AI-generated summary at the top of the page. No surprises here, as it is likely the most valuable query for a boutique hotel in Los Angeles.

When an AI Overview fires, paid CTR drops by more than 50% according to multiple independent studies. Guests who click through are increasingly decided. They have already done their research in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. They are now comparing specific properties on price and availability and no longer just browsing for inspiration.

Running a traditional broad match keyword campaign to capture these guests is like hiring a Master Sommelier to sell someone a cheap beer they had already decided to order before they walked in the door.

Example:

Any boutique property in the Venice Beach/Santa Monica area running broad match on “LA boutique hotels” is increasingly buying clicks from guests who will bounce straight back to an AI tool to finish their research. That budget is better deployed on exact match brand terms, competitor conquest campaigns for comparable nearby properties, and high-intent transactional phrases like “Venice Beach hotel deals this weekend.”

Do this:

  • Audit your search terms report and pause any keyword that triggers informational intent.
  • Switch to exact and phrase match for your core campaigns.
  • Make your booking landing page earn the click with frictionless rate competitiveness. Your hotel website design needs to convert the high-intent guests who do click through.
  • Monitor your impression-to-click ratio. In a zero-click world, stable impressions are a vanity metric.
B. Google Performance Max & AI Max: Powerful Engines, But Read the Manual First
Performance Max (PMax) is Google’s fully AI-automated campaign that includes Search, Display, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, and Discover in a single campaign. It integrates directly with Google Hotel Center and automatically targets travelers who have demonstrated clear booking intent.

Meanwhile, AI Max with Smart Bidding (the shiny new product from Google) delivered an 18% increase in unique search query categories with conversions, and a 19% increase in overall conversions!

However, there is one catch: PMax needs conversion volume to learn, and it needs a lot of it. Some high-conversion-volume hotels with clean CRM pipelines are seeing real gains. The format can absolutely deliver, but it is not guaranteed. The gap between a well-fed PMax campaign and an underpowered one is enormous.

Example:

A 30-room boutique hotel in Miami with fewer than 200 tracked conversions per month does not have enough signal for the algorithm to optimize meaningfully. It will quietly include branded search traffic in its return on ad spend (ROAS) number that would have converted anyway. Garbage in, confident-looking report out. Big hotel marketing agencies love it!

Do this:

  • Run a structured campaign with controlled bidding while you build conversion volume.
  • Exclude branded terms; otherwise, it inflates its ROAS.
  • Feed it your best first-party CRM data, including past booker lists, and replace generic asset headlines like “Book Now” with room and location-specific copy.
C. Google AI-Generated Creative: Robots Writing for Robots

A real gift buried inside Google’s AI push is its new generative AI tools. These can help create compelling headlines, descriptions, and lifestyle imagery directly in Google Ads. Google is giving hotels the ability to generate and test hundreds of creative combinations of seasonal campaigns across multiple room types. All this can be done without briefing your (nice, but sometimes very moody) web designer!

Do this:

  • Test Google’s generative creative tools to expand your asset library, especially for PMax asset groups, where creative diversity directly affects algorithmic performance.
  • Pro tip: Always use the AI as a first-draft generator, not a final approver. Your brand voice still needs a human edit.  Always take one last look before the robots deploy anything.

2. Meta (Facebook + Instagram) Advertising

I never thought a day would come when the company I still refer to as “The Facebook” would overtake Google in global ad revenues. Your social media feelings aside, it is time to approach Facebook and Instagram ads with a little more strategy and seriousness.

Meta’s AI capabilities are turning it from an inspiration layer of travel planning into a hyper-personalized decision confirmation engine. After getting a property recommendation from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, travelers immediately open Instagram to validate it emotionally. They scroll the feed, check tagged photos, and decide if the hotel looks as good as the AI described it, and whether real humans on social media agree. Here are some new tools that make advertising more effective on this “decision confirmation engine.”

A. Advantage+: Manual Audience Building Is Dead

Meta’s Advantage+ suite fully automates audience targeting and ad placements. Result? Advantage+ campaigns now average a $4.52 return for every $1 spent, approximately 22% higher than manually managed campaigns.

Yes, the robots are winning!

Do this:

  • Shift your Meta campaign objective from conversions to consideration.
  • Educate stakeholders that ROI magic is simply not going to show up in Google Analytics reports.
  • Optimize for landing page views, profile visits, and video views on your most immersive content.
B. Dynamic Travel Ads: The Polite Social Stalking Algorithm

Meta’s Dynamic Travel Ads use AI to retarget a guest with the exact room type they browsed but did not book.

Example: A guest who spent 5 minutes on the King Bed Suites page of a hotel in Miami and then closed the tab will see an Instagram ad showing that exact room the next morning.

Creepy? Definitely yes. Effective? Kind of.

Do this:

  • Run a dedicated retargeting campaign for guests who visited your website but did not book.
  • This is your warmest audience and one of the highest-ROAS plays in hotel paid media right now.
  • Build creative that confirms rather than sells: location, lighting, and the view. Real and specific beats over-polished and generic every time.

3. Programmatic and Display Advertising

AI is solving the programmatic industry’s biggest historical problem: wasted impressions on uninterested audiences. Unfortunately, it has also created a significant new problem: the hotel guest who did all their research in an AI tool and left no targeting breadcrumbs behind.

A. The Upside: Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)

DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization) is a major upgrade for programmatic platforms, as they are using AI to analyze behavioral signals across billions of data points like flight searches, weather, local events, and past booking windows.

DCO is boosting CTR by an average of 32% and reducing cost per acquisition by an estimated 30% compared to traditional display ads.

Example:

A business traveler reading financial news on a Tuesday morning sees an ad highlighting a hotel’s proximity to the Miami convention center. A family browsing a travel blog on a Saturday afternoon sees the pool. Same property, same budget, dramatically different message.

B. The Downside: AI Research Leaves No Footprints

AI assistants generate no cookies or behavioral data. A guest who spent 20 minutes researching Miami hotels in ChatGPT is invisible to your programmatic targeting stack, showing up only as direct traffic and vanishing into the internet like Keyser Söze.

This is exactly why Meta’s social graph, not dependent on browser-based tracking, is growing at 24% while programmatic display budgets face increasing pressure to justify their returns.

Do this:

  • Restructure your display as a retention channel rather than a prospecting channel. Past bookers, loyalty members and website visitors with booking engine sessions are the right audiences.
  • Pressure-test your programmatic ROAS: if more than 20% comes from view-through conversions, your actual performance is lower than the analytics dashboard suggests. View-through attribution is the most generous and least reliable metric in display reporting.

Hotel Revenue Attribution Problem Is Getting Worse

Your hotel paid media attribution model is probably wrong, and AI is only making it worse. AI-referred research sessions generate no cookies, UTM parameters or referral strings. All these guests simply show up as direct traffic in GA4. These AI-orchestrated journeys are creating attribution gaps that traditional models cannot close. The result: you are over-investing in channels that close bookings and underinvesting in channels that create intent. Why? Because in old school marketing, closers capture all credit (and get the coffee).

Last-click attribution is once again destroying marketing. I wrote about this problem years ago and it hasn’t changed. In an AI-native world, tracking tools are becoming increasingly unreliable. This is going to be one of the hardest things for marketers, and it is already making them very unhappy. R.J. MacReady said it best in the 1982 masterpiece The Thing:

“Nobody trusts anybody now… and we’re all very tired.”

Example:

A guest who spent 20 minutes with Gemini, watched your Instagram Reels, compared rates on Expedia, and then searched your hotel name in Google clicks on a brand name ad and books the room. Google Brand Search conversion gets 100% credit. Gemini, Instagram and Expedia get 0%. Google Ads takes a bow and invoices you accordingly. 

Meanwhile, hotel owners and asset managers are still asking why you are spending on Instagram and Expedia Ads without a clear “ROI.” The very same painful conversations we had in the early days of Google continue into the age of AI.

Do this:

  • Educate your hotel stakeholders. Email them this article.
  • Move from last-click to data-driven attribution in Google Ads today.
  • Watch your direct traffic trend: a rise in direct traffic is increasingly a signal that AI is recommending you. It’s not just guests typing your URL from memory, as we used to claim in not so ancient times.
  • Revisit whether you view hotel marketing as a cost or an investment. In the AI era, the gap between those two mindsets is wider than ever.

Paid Media’s Future Inside AI

There is no free lunch. As AI platforms face inevitable pressure to show returns on their enormous infrastructure investments, there will be IPOs. Then the shareholders (just like they did with Google) will immediately demand profits. The new banana company will be arriving again and it will be asking you to pay for placement… just as Google did in the early 2000s and then Facebook and then Instagram (Meta).

I’m sure you have heard that AI is very expensive to run and someone (eventually) has to pay the bills. The signs are everywhere but soon there will be ads within your favorite AI:

  • ChatGPT launched its self-serve advertising platform in May 2026, opening AI-native ads to businesses of all sizes for the first time.
  • Google is already testing ads inside AI Mode and AI Overviews, which now reach over 2 billion monthly users across 200 countries (BookAssist).
  • Google announced $175 to $185 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. That’s nearly double its 2025 spending! Most of it is going toward AI infrastructure, and they will need to show returns to shareholders…you can see where this is going.

The hotel paid media playbook has been rewritten twice before: when Google Search ads arrived, then when Meta opened its ad platform. Both times, the hotels that moved early captured more bookings, revenue and market share. AI platforms are following the same arc, just much faster. The inventory is live and the auction is forming!

For hotels, the format will feel less like a banner ad and more like a concierge recommendation. A guest asks ChatGPT: “Best boutique hotel near the Colosseum for October?” The AI returns a shortlist. One property appears as a sponsored “featured option,” labeled and placed at the exact moment of decision inside a personalized conversation. That is a very different kind of placement from a search results page.

Do this:

  • Improve these today: review volume, structured data quality, and bid strategy.
  • Make sure your website is AI-ready. AI placement will not be owned by those with the biggest budgets but those whose digital presence is machine-readable.

Time for a quote:

The organic AI recommendation work you do today is the foundation for paid AI placement tomorrow.

– Vikram Singh

Conclusion

The hotel industry rewired its paid media and advertising strategy when Google arrived, and then rewired it again when social media advertising launched. Early movers built advantages that took competitors years to close. The hotels that recognize and embrace this new leverage will hold the same structural advantage that early adopters captured when the paid media era began in the early 2000s.

AI is not eliminating paid media expertise. It is shifting the leverage points toward channels and formats that are less familiar and harder to measure. Mass produced marketing campaigns are out. It’s time to invest your time and money with the right people in order to succeed in your hotel’s marketing efforts.

The window to move first is open. It will not stay that way.


Sources

Seer Interactive: Google AI Overview Study — SEO & PPC CTR Impact (September 2025 update)
eMarketer: Digital Ad Spending Forecast H2 2025; Meta to Surpass Google in Digital Ad Revenues (April 2026)
IAB: 2026 Outlook Study: Ad Spend, Opportunities, and Strategies for Growth (January 2026)
Semrush: AI Overviews Impact on Search in 2025 (March 2025)
SparkToro/Datos & Similarweb: Zero-Click Search Studies (2017–2025); Similarweb Zero-Click Acceleration Report (May 2024–May 2025)
Bookassist: Google’s New AI Ads — What Hoteliers Need to Know (December 2025)
Alphabet / Google: Q4 2025 Earnings and 2026 Capital Expenditure Guidance (February 2026)

A Simple Checklist to Make Your Hotel Website AI-Friendly

Following up my last post on AI and hotel commercial optimization, I want to share some insights on how to make hotel websites discoverable to the newest wave of robots.

As we move further away from Google search results pages into AI conversations, the challenge has shifted from findability to extractability. If AI can read your website and understand what you offer, then there is a good chance it will confidently recommend you to the right traveler at the right moment.

It is important to note that AI results are about as inconsistent as Google Search was in its early days. Improving AI is not a hotel’s job. There are billions of dollars getting poured into that. All you need to do is continually make sure that your hotel content can be consumed by AI.

The Guest Journey Has Changed

A traveler planning a long weekend in Miami no longer opens twelve browser tabs, cross-references review sites, and digs through OTA listings. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask: “What’s the best boutique hotel in South Beach for a couples trip?” In seconds, AI delivers a curated, confident answer drawn from everything it has absorbed across the web. No search results page. No ads (yet). Just a clear recommendation.

This is the new discovery moment. If your hotel isn’t represented in the content AI can read, you simply don’t exist in that moment. Think of it like the second page of Google results, which was jokingly referred to as a great place to “hide a dead body” because nobody goes there. A classic dad joke, and I’m fully here for it.

AI assistants are increasingly embedded throughout the trip-planning process: suggesting destinations, comparing properties, summarizing reviews, and handling bookings directly. Major OTAs are racing to integrate AI into their products. Google’s AI Overviews are already reshaping how hotel search results appear. The guest journey is being rewritten in real time.

At the center of all of it is your hotel website, which also happens to be the only thing you can control. The questions every hotel should be asking right now: Does your website actually work for an AI visitor? Is it AI-friendly and accessible? Does the information that AI needs in order to recommend you exist in a format it can read?

Know Your AI Visitors

Before diving into the checklist, you need to know that you have two distinct types of AI visiting your website.

  • AI Bots (Web Crawlers for Model Training)
    These crawlers visit massive swaths of the web to gather training data. Unlike the traditional search engine crawler (like GoogleBot), which gathers data for future retrieval and ranking, AI crawlers (like GPTBot) collect data for knowledge and language reasoning. They’re building a picture of your hotel that may inform recommendations now and in the future.

  • AI Agents (Task-Oriented Virtual Visitors)
    These are virtual visitors using simulated browsers, keyboards, and cursors to complete a task. That task might be to compile a research spreadsheet of possible hotel partners, or it might be to submit a booking form. Agentic AI is still young, but it’s growing fast. It will be a significant part of your traffic picture sooner than most hoteliers expect.

AI Optimization Checklist

There are things you can do right now to stay on track for current and future AI discoverability. In this post, let’s get started by outlining six steps for optimizing your hotel’s cornerstone digital asset: your hotel website. 

1. AI Does Not Understand Hotel Speak

AI is sold as an all-knowing oracle. In practice, it reads your hotel website like a very literal-minded intern who just started today. Counter to the keyword-focused era of Google SEO, AI doesn’t care about keywords or adjectives. It only cares about specifics.

Most of our hotel websites are currently being built by a small cluster of vendors. A lot of them have the same keyword stuffed and adjective-heavy headers, followed by sparse bullet points and drone video shots. Less content and bigger images became the new beautiful in recent years. Unfortunately, it has made many of our websites useless for the new breed of robots looking for a specific kind of factual information.

Consider how these two hotels perform when an AI is asked to recommend “the best boutique hotel in South Beach.”

Hotel 1: “Escape to Neon Paradise. Experience the heartbeat of Miami. Where Art Deco glamour meets modern luxury, and the ocean breeze whispers through the palms.”

Hotel 2: “The Beachcomber: 4-star oceanfront boutique hotel at 1198 Ocean Drive, South Beach. 50 ocean-view suites with king beds, high-speed Wi-Fi, and rainfall showers. 5-minute walk to Lummus Park. On-site Mediterranean restaurant, rooftop bar, heated pool, and daily beachfront yoga. Fully ADA-compliant and pet-friendly.”

Hotel 2 wins in every scenario. AI can’t catch “the feels” from your website. It needs location markers, factual amenity descriptions, and language it can extract and use.

You need to audit your key hotel website pages and make sure the following are written in plain, direct language:

  • Every service you offer
  • Who you serve
  • Your precise location and nearby landmarks
  • Credentials, certifications, and affiliations
  • Detailed descriptions of room types, dining venues, spa offerings, and meeting spaces

Please note: AI’s opinion of your hotel doesn’t stop at your website. It also trains on press coverage, OTA reviews, and social media. A great website is necessary, but your entire digital footprint is on trial. Stay tuned, as we will discuss all of these topics in future articles.

2. AI Cannot See Your Hotel Website Images

Hotel website vendors have largely shifted their focus to showcasing beautiful photography over content. Sadly, AI bots don’t look at pictures (yet). They read the text around them. Even awards, certifications, and key selling points (Forbes, Conde Nast, etc.) displayed on the website as images are effectively invisible to AI. The fix is straightforward:

  • Add Alt text on every image (like old school SEO).
  • Add supporting body copy that puts into words what the image is showing.
  • Any award, certification, or credential that exists only as a graphic will need to also exist as actual text somewhere on the page.

Photos remain essential for your human visitors; that doesn’t change. We just need to make some content adjustments to stay discoverable to the new army of robots.

3. AI Cannot Watch Your Hotel Videos

I’m old enough to remember the drone video invasion that swept hotel website homepages a decade ago. Load times be damned, design agencies went all-in on homepage drone footage with zero text. Many of the websites were stunning. But as someone who actually reads content…I was quietly disappointed.

Fast forward to today, and it turns out AI shares my frustration. It can’t extract meaning from video footage. It can read text wrapped around it, and it can try to digest the spoken words. Here is how to make your videos talk to AI effectively:

  • Narrate Bookable Details, Not Just Vibes:
    Talk about room types, bed configs, gym equipment, F&B outlet names. Then a guest asking AI “which hotel has a Peloton gym and a rooftop bar?” will get an answer. If it isn’t said on camera, it doesn’t get recommended.

  • Chapter Videos Like a Pre-Booking FAQ:
    AI reads chapter headings and can send guests directly to their answer. Try something like this:
    0:18 – Workspace & Wi-Fi 
    0:45 – Fitness Center 
    1:10 – Dining Hours 
    1:45 – Meeting Spaces

     

  • Upload Your Own Transcript:
    Auto-captions mangle hotel language. “The Founder’s Suite” becomes “founders sweet.” A clean .srt file means every room type and brand name is spelled correctly and properly indexed.

  • Bonus Quick Fix for YouTube Videos
    Click Show Transcript,* copy the text, and post it on your website as a companion page or collapsible section. That turns invisible video content into readable, indexable text instantly.**


    * This is only a shortcut. I recommend using a human-verified transcription for accuracy.
    ** YouTube has a setting that lets AI train directly on your channel’s content. Go to Settings > Channel > Advanced Settings. One click opens the door for AI to index everything you’ve ever published.

4. Build an AI Training Page

Think of it as a How to Train Your Dragon scenario… except the dragon is an AI LLM (large language model) and you’re trying to get it to recommend your hotel to guests.

Step 1: Create a dedicated “AI Information” page and link to it from your footer. This becomes your hotel’s structured briefing for machines. Everything goes here: location details, room specifications, dining concepts, accessibility features, nearby attractions, brand affiliations, awards, sustainability practices, etc. No marketing fluff, no adjectives. Write it for a robot, not a human.

Step 2: Layer in schema markup. Structured data tags break your content into labeled categories like address, room types, amenities, price range. This is something AI systems can parse without guessing. Direct evidence that LLMs read schema is still emerging, but hybrid systems like Gemini and Perplexity lean on search engine indexing as part of their process. Since search engines absolutely use schema, I think this step is worth doing.

Pro tip: Why not use AI to build it? Ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to draft this page for your hotel. AI-written content optimized for AI comprehension is a delightfully circular solution. Cue in the circle of life, Lion King.

5. Mo’ JavaScript, Mo’ AI Problems

Many hotel websites are simply too fancy for their own good. There are text elements that only appear when a visitor clicks, hovers, or scrolls. Magical, hidden dropdowns, an accordion/hamburger nav, a tabbed panel…basically built to be hidden from AI crawlers.

LLM crawlers generally don’t execute JavaScript. They only read the raw HTML that your server delivers on the first request. If your essential content (ex: room descriptions, location details, dining hours, etc.) only loads after a user interaction, please be aware that AI may never see it!

This process will likely improve as AI infrastructure matures and billions of dollars continue to pour into the technology. However, the best practice right now is to minimize JavaScript-dependent content delivery wherever possible. What’s good discipline for traditional SEO remains good discipline for AI optimization. Read the manuscripts, they already exist! 

6. Track Your Website AI Traffic

Once your hotel is indexed and referenced by AI systems, you’ll want to know which platforms are actually sending guests your way. Set up your Google Analytics (GA4) properly and go in with realistic expectations. Perfect data tracking isn’t on the table, and I don’t see it happening for a while.

What you can see:
Traffic from browser-based AI apps like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini will often appear as Direct traffic in GA4. Building a custom exploration report to isolate AI referral sources is a very useful starting point. It’s imperfect, but informative.

What you cannot see:
AI Agents browsing your site on behalf of a guest don’t show up in GA4 at all. Unlike Cookie Monster, AI agents don’t accept cookies. They research, compare, and shortlist hotels without leaving a single trackable footprint. This is a genuine ghost in the machine and the analytics industry hasn’t solved it… yet.

Tracking what you can builds a baseline. As AI referral traffic grows, even imperfect data will reveal which platforms are driving discovery and whether your optimization efforts are moving the needle. With both Perplexity and Chat IPOs on the horizon, you know paid ads and placement cannot be far behind. 

Measurement infrastructure for AI-driven hospitality traffic is still being built. Get into free GA4 now, document your baseline, and you will already be ahead of every competitor who waits until the data is “cleaner.”

Conclusion

The hotel industry went through the same kind of reckoning in the late 1990s when Google arrived and hotels had to learn to write for a machine. Many resisted, but the ones that adapted early thrived. A new wave is now underway. Our challenge has shifted from findability to extractability. The good news is that the fundamentals haven’t changed: be present, be structured, and be specific. Don’t hide important information in formats AI can’t read. The manuscripts are already here… the only question is whether your hotel reads them in time.

100 Years of Solitude: AI and Hotel Commercial Optimization

I knew at some point I would be writing about how AI is changing the hotel and travel commercial optimization world. Again. Why again? Because history is repeating itself.
 
When I think about what’s happening in hotel and travel marketing right now, it reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. (In my opinion, one of the best books ever written. I highly recommend it.) Here’s a short summary of the book, so you can get a feel for what I’m trying to share.
 
In García Márquez’s masterpiece, the Buendía family spends a century repeating the same mistakes. Generation after generation, men named José Arcadio chase the same obsessions and make the same catastrophic choices; at the same time, they are convinced that they are doing something entirely new. The fictional town of Macondo rises, flourishes, and crumbles. At the very end, the last surviving Buendía finally deciphers the ancient manuscripts that predicted it all. The tragedy was not that their fate occured. It was fact that it was avoidable.
 
Likewise, we have all been at this technological crossroad before. The technology is different, but the fundamental challenge is identical. A new system has arrived that will quickly dominate the way travelers research and discover hotels. The system runs on information. Hotels that feed it the right information in the right format will get recommended. Hotels that don’t will be lost.
 
Folks, we already did this with Google in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The manuscripts are there (just scroll back to my older blog posts). We just need to read them.
 

September 4, 1998

 
In 1998, the internet was new and chaotic, and nobody in hospitality knew what to do with it. Hotels had websites (if you could call them that): static pages with a phone number, and maybe a jpeg of the lobby that took two minutes to load on a dial-up connection. The idea that a traveler might book a room through a website seemed absurd… that’s what travel agents were for!
 
Then came Google. And everything changed.
 
Suddenly there was a system, and an all-encompassing algorithm that provided a bridge (or a barrier) between the hotel and the traveler. The algorithm didn’t care how beautiful your printed brochure was, how many years you’d been in business, or what your general manager thought about your property’s reputation. It read your website. It counted your words. It looked at your structure, your links, your load speed, your metadata. And based on what it found, it decided whether or not to send travelers your way.
 
The hotel commercial optimization professionals who grasped this early did something that felt deeply counterintuitive at the time: they started writing for a machine! They optimized page titles and header tags. They built content around the specific phrases travelers were typing into search boxes. They structured their websites not just to look good to human eyes, but to be readable, “crawlable” and “rankable” by digital spiders that had never stayed in a hotel and never would.
 
What about the hotels that ignored it? They still received bookings from offline channels and online travel agencies (OTAs). OTAs have always been the largest investors in technology, as they do not have any real assets to maintain and pay for. The hotels that thrived were the ones who were willing to take the leap and join the new world.
 

The Banana Company Arrives… Again

 
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the banana company arrives in Macondo with promises of prosperity and modernity. It transforms the town,  bringing electricity, railways, and a new kind of commerce. It also reshapes everything around its own needs, on its own terms, whether Macondo is ready or not.
 
The AI revolution in hotels and travel feels a lot like that arrival. ChatGPT launched to the public in November 2022. Within months, millions of people were using it to plan trips. By 2024, Google had integrated AI Overviews into its search results. That means that for many hotel-related queries on Google, Gemini is generating the answer directly on the results page. Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini are all training on existing web content and delivering hotel recommendations with confident, authoritative directness.
 
Traveler behavior reinforces this story. Fewer clicks, more answers. Less browsing, more asking AI. The question has shifted from “hotels in Barcelona” to “find me the best design hotel in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter for a solo traveler who wants walkability and a rooftop bar.” That’s not a simple search query…that’s a conversation. And AI answers it in one response.
 
The discovery moment has moved. It now happens inside an AI conversation, not on a search results page. The hotels that show up in that conversation are the ones that have given AI what it needs to understand them.
 
Sound familiar? It should. 
 

The Patterns Are Already in the Manuscripts

 
The Buendías didn’t see what was happening, even though the answers were right under their noses. Melquíades left manuscripts in the house that contained the entire history of the Buendía family: every birth, every death, every mistake. The tragedy was that nobody translated them until it was too late.
 
The secrets of technology-driven optimization for hospitality and travel are similarly well-documented if you know where to look. The same pattern has played out three times now with increasing speed.
 
Wave One: The Website (Late 1990s)
Hotels had to build a digital presence from scratch. The challenge was digital existence: getting online, making information available by creating a basic web infrastructure. The winners were the early adopters who took the medium seriously before their competitors did. 
 
Wave Two: Search Engine Optimization/Paid Marketing (Early 2000s–2010s)
Having a website was no longer enough. It had to be findable. The challenge shifted to figuring out how to  structure your hotel’s online content so that Google’s crawlers would read it, rank it, and serve it to travelers at the right moment. This is when keywords, metadata, page structure, and link building became core marketing disciplines for hotels (otherwise known as search engine marketing). When that was not enough, Google Ads (paid media) provided a new superhighway to success; the smartest hotels participated in both organic and paid marketing efforts to maximize their exposure and revenue.
 
Wave Three: AI Optimization (Now)
Being findable on Google today isn’t enough. Now you have to be intelligible to AI. The challenge has shifted again, only this time to extractability. AI systems need to read your website and understand it with precision: what you offer, where you are, who you serve, and why someone should choose you. The hotels that crack this code will be the ones AI recommends. The rest will be invisible in the new discovery moment. 
 
Each wave has required writing for a new kind of reader. In 1999, that reader was a human with a modem. In 2005, it was a search crawler (GoogleBot). In 2025, it is a large language model, agentic AI. 
 
The fundamentals of each wave are strikingly similar. Be present, be structured, and be specific. Give the system what it needs to understand you. Don’t hide important information in formats the system can’t read. In my experience, the hotels that struggle in each new wave are almost always ones who built beautifully for the previous wave and then forgot to adapt.
 

What AI Is Actually Reading — And What It Can’t

To optimize for AI the way previous generations optimized for Google, you have to understand how AI reads. Simple answer: it reads like a very thorough, very literal research assistant who has never visited your hotel and has no patience for poetry, adjective-heavy word salads, or “good vibes” content.
 
AI training bots (GPTBot,  Google’s Gemini crawlers, etc) scrape the open web and ingest text. They build their understanding of your hotel from whatever text they can find: your website, your press coverage, your reviews, mentions on travel blogs, OTA listings, social media posts. They assemble a picture of your property from all of it, based on what they can actually read and process.
Here is what they cannot process (yet):
  • Images without text descriptions
  • Videos without transcripts
  • Text that only appears after a JavaScript interaction
  • Information locked inside PDFs or interactive widgets
If your hotel’s most compelling selling points live in a drone video on your homepage with no accompanying text, AI doesn’t know about them.
 
I am old enough to remember that hotels had a similar issue with early search engines. Google couldn’t read Flash or index images. Hotels that built their entire websites in Flash (and many did) were effectively invisible to search. All hotels over time fixed that. Now, all hotels will need to adapt to the AI equivalent. 
 
Hotel content is moving from the traditional keyword stuffing festival to AI-friendly, very specific and factual content written in plain language. We are going to move away from content such as “nestled in the vibrant heart of the city” to “located at 45 Park Lane, a four-minute walk from Hyde Park and eight minutes from the nearest Tube station.” In Food and Beverage, we will move from “an unparalleled dining experience”  to “our restaurant serves modern European cuisine and is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 6am -10pm, with a dedicated tasting menu available Tuesday through Saturday.”
 

Time to get my quote in:

“Adjectives don’t train AI. It feasts on facts.”- Vikram Singh
 

The Ghost in the Machine: Agentic AI Age

Even as I write this, I can see a wave of technology that goes beyond anything we have seen to date. This is where hotel owners need to pay very close attention, because it will change not just how travelers find hotels, but also how they will interact with them in the very near future.
 
An AI agent is not a search engine or a chatbot. It is a system that takes instructions from a human and then acts in the world to fulfill them autonomously and across multiple steps using real tools. An AI agent can browse the web, fill out forms, send emails, make reservations, and complete transactions. It operates a virtual browser with a virtual keyboard and mouse, navigating websites the way a human would, except faster, more literally, and without the patience to decode ambiguous interfaces, scrolls and images.
 
The implications for hotels and travel are profound. Right now, a traveler might ask an AI: “Find me a four-star hotel in Lisbon available the week of June 15, with a rooftop pool and breakfast included, and book the best value option under 300 Euros a night.” The current generation of AI assistants would research and present options for the person to book. The next generation will research it and complete the booking… if your website’s booking engine is navigable by an automated agent. Otherwise, they will find another hotel, or another way to book that may include fees for your hotel.
 
The travel agent visiting your website on behalf of a future guest is not human. It will not respond to atmosphere or beautiful photography. It is looking for machine-readable information + functional booking path. If it encounters a JavaScript-heavy booking widget that requires cookies, a hover menu that doesn’t render without a mouse, or a rates page that loads dynamically…game over. It will not send you an email. It may simply move on to the next comparable property.
 
Early agentic systems are already operating. The infrastructure is being built at warp speed. The hotels that have clean, structured, machine-readable websites with clear booking paths will have a natural advantage when agentic AI goes mainstream. The ones that built elaborate interactive experiences for the human eye may find themselves bypassed entirely.
 
In the fictional town of Macondo, those with the most elaborate houses were were often the ones least prepared when the world changed around them. Stay nimble, move fast.
 

Optimization Is a Permanent Discipline

After almost 30 years of working in commercial optimization, I am reading and learning even more today than when I started. There is no final destination in this business. Hotel revenue optimization is a permanent discipline that requires ongoing study, as things are always in flux.
 
In  García Márquez’s novel, Macondo’s decline wasn’t inevitable. It was chosen, one small failure to adapt at a time. Hotel commercial optimization has its own version of this danger. 
 
Every wave of optimization has been about the same thing: giving the gatekeeper system what it needs to understand and recommend you. In 2000, that gatekeeper was a search engine ranking algorithm. In 2025, it is a large language model. In 2030, it will be something else we can’t yet fully describe.
 
Hotels that thrive over time share a common orientation: they take the new mediums seriously. They don’t wait for the technology to become mainstream before they adapt. They read the manuscripts early. 
 

Conclusion

At the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the last Buendía finally deciphers Melquíades’ manuscripts. But we are not at the end of our story. Hotel marketers are holding the manuscripts right now. The pattern of technology-driven optimization is recognizable. We know how this wave works because we have watched previous waves. We know that AI is transforming travel discovery because the traveler behavior data is already showing it. We know that agentic AI is coming, because the infrastructure is being built in plain sight.
 
The question is not how AI will reshape how hotels are found and booked. The question is whether your hotel will continue to rise to the occasion, one wave after another.
 

The important lesson here is to always be present and paying attention. To quote the legend himself:

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” — Gabriel García Márquez