How AI Search Is Helping OTAs – And How Your Hotel Can Respond
The hospitality industry is often cited as a prime candidate for AI‑driven transformation. The promise is appealing: leaner operations, lower staff costs, and smarter decisions. In practice, however, AI delivers the greatest value behind the scenes, not as a replacement for the human touch that defines a memorable guest experience.
Guests – especially younger travellers – consistently indicate that they want more personalisation, more authenticity, and a stronger sense of escape. These expectations are closely tied to human interaction, empathy, and service. While AI can enhance those experiences, using it as the first point of contact with guests is not always aligned with what they value most.
Where AI excels today is in analysis: understanding booking patterns, segment behaviour, and sentiment at scale. Front‑of‑house automation, on the other hand, requires careful design and testing to avoid frustrating guests or diluting brand personality.
This article focuses on one area where AI is already reshaping the digital guest journey - and where hotels can take immediate, practical action: AI‑generated search results.
What are AI search results?
AI search results are AI‑generated answers that appear at the top of search engine results pages when users type a question into a search bar. They are not the same as asking a chatbot which hotel is “best” in a destination. Instead, they are summaries or snippets that pull together information from multiple sources.
For example, a user might search:
“What time does the restaurant at [Hotel Name] close?”
The search engine then generates an answer based on information it has ingested from websites, listings, and other data sources. This answer may appear as:
A short paragraph of text
A bulleted list
An animated, chatbot‑style response
A snippet with a small link icon that, when clicked, shows the source website
These are AI search results - and they are fast becoming a key way guests obtain information about a property.
Why OTAs are benefiting from AI search
Online travel agencies (OTAs) are highly sophisticated digital marketers. They invest heavily in content, search optimisation, and structured data, which means their pages are often the sources AI systems draw from when generating answers about your hotel.
When a potential guest asks a specific question about your property, the path often looks like this:
The guest searches a question about your hotel.
The AI result surfaces information sourced from an OTA page.
The guest clicks through to the OTA to “confirm” details.
The guest is then encouraged to complete the booking on the OTA platform.
In other words, the OTAs are capturing free, high‑intent traffic that originated with interest in your hotel and redirecting it into their own conversion funnel. This adds unnecessary complexity to the booking journey and increases your reliance on third‑party channels.
Why hotels need to take control
There are three main reasons to address how your property appears in AI search results:
1. Accuracy and the risk of AI hallucinations
AI systems are not infallible. “Hallucinations” occur when AI generates information that is incorrect or entirely fabricated. If a search engine has ingested outdated or inaccurate data from OTAs or other third‑party sources, AI answers about your hotel may be wrong—listing facilities you don’t have, policies you’ve changed, or opening hours that no longer apply.
When guests book based on inaccurate information, disputes and negative reviews often follow, even when the hotel had no direct role in publishing those details.
2. Lost direct business to intermediaries
When AI search results primarily reference OTAs, they effectively divert potential direct bookers to intermediary platforms. Guests who simply wanted a factual answer about your property end up in an OTA environment where they are presented with competitor options and price comparisons.
Doing nothing allows this leakage to continue.
3. It is low‑cost and straightforward to fix
Improving how AI search answers reference your hotel is largely a content and structure task. By ensuring that your own website is the most authoritative, up‑to‑date, and clearly formatted source of information about your property, you increase the likelihood that search engines will use your site as the primary reference.
This can often be achieved by:
Publishing a well‑structured FAQ or “Need to Know” page
Ensuring key details (facilities, opening hours, policies, amenities) are clearly stated in text, not just in images or PDFs
Using consistent naming and descriptions across your site and listings
Implementing SEO codes where appropriate
A simple template for this kind of content can be adapted to your property and provided to your web team to implement.
Turning AI search to your advantage
AI‑generated search results are not going away. For hotels, they represent both a risk and an opportunity:
A risk, if OTAs and outdated third‑party content become the default sources of truth about your property.
An opportunity, if your own website becomes the authoritative reference for accurate, up‑to‑date answers guests are actively seeking.
By taking a small amount of time to structure and update key information on your site, your property can:
Reduce the risk of misinformation and guest disappointment
Limit traffic leakage to OTAs
Improve visibility at the top of search results
Potentially capture more direct bookings from high‑intent searchers
Now is an ideal moment to review how your hotel appears in AI search results and to ensure your own channels, not intermediaries, are shaping the conversation about your property.
About the author
Glyn Spencer Hopkins is the owner of Internet Affected and has been working exclusively with hotels and luxury brands for over a decade.
Internet Affected provides digital revenue services tailored to the individual characters of hotels; a complete range of services designed to help them take back ownership of their hotel brand from the OTAs. Specialized marketing solutions to increase guest loyalty, food & beverage bookings, events and wedding inquiries, clearly reported in straightforward language.
