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How Hotels and OTAs Are Actually Using AI Today

• Jeff Borman and Matt Brown

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What specific AI-related things are good hotel commercial leaders actually doing today? Great question! It's already everywhere, so we got deep and practical for this episode. We talk about:

  • How Al agents are starting to handle everything from customer service queries to qualifying sales leads, reshaping the whole workforce
  • How AI is elevating guest experience through customer data, CRM, and audience management
  • Where AI is getting all its hotel data
  • The coming drop in search engine volume
  • Tools you can use to optimize your website and format your content for AI readability
Matt Brown:

I'm Matt Brown. That person you can't see over there is Jeff Borman. We host the show together and I think, jeff, I think we do a great job of hosting it. It's incredible. We've done this for almost 80 episodes. As we near 100, we're going to have to do something special. Almost 80 episodes, as we near 100, we're going to have to do something special. Today we are continuing a discussion about the state of AI. I know it's everybody's favorite topic, and for good reason, but we're going to give it a little bit more of a spin related to the exponential growth rates within travel and why people are using it for travel. We're in that phase right now which reminds me a lot of the late 90s of everybody wants to come over like the soothsayer but they're not quite sure what's gonna happen, but they still wanna kind of project authority. If there's one thing Jeff and I do really well, it's not project authority, so you don't have to have that worry with us.

Jeff Borman:

Or even knowledge, really.

Matt Brown:

No, no, no knowledge. How, so you don't have to have that worry with us? Or even knowledge, really, no, no, no knowledge. How can the world of people new to engaging in AI approach this? Because it's, all, I think, a little daunting. Chatgpt is not so daunting because people are still using it. Most people who don't know anything about AI are using they're gingerly using something like ChatGPT as essentially just a glorified search engine. But let's start with what the OTAs are doing today.

Jeff Borman:

Expedia held its Explore conference in May and shared some insights into the real-world uses they have today with AI-powered features focused on really driving higher engagement and conversion. They recently launched automated AI filters, a functionality that's driving 35% conversion, lift and lower cancellation rates, in addition to the existing AI-generated property summaries and AI-powered property Q&A, which is elevating the content they display and that's driving 2X conversion. Expedia guides its suppliers so hotel, community or air or car to ensure accurate content and highlight unique attributes so that its AI filters and summaries can help those stand out better, and I think when we get to the hotel side of what to do, that's very similar. Ai needs accuracy and it needs things that can be read in LLM models.

Jeff Borman:

The company introduced an AI itinerary builder on Expedia, using AI to create day-by-day itineraries based on interests and favorites and saved bookings and previous searches, and that is having an effect of doubling the attach rate of an activity to a booking. Flight deals is something Expedia launched in January. It uses AI to flag fares when they go 20% below a predicted price. That's helping drive 15% higher conversion, more frequent visits to Expedia and 50% higher opt-in for alerts to the users. Otas or suppliers may gain favor as AI-driven agents begin booking travel autonomously, but I think this is getting into the agentic part of AI Again. That's future state, not today, but they're starting to tread into that realm as well.

Matt Brown:

I wonder how aggressive the hotels themselves are about this. The bookingcoms and the Expedia's of the world sound like they have dev teams and product teams working on this actively right now, and I wonder if we were to peek under the hood of Hilton and Marriott. I wonder if they're taking it as seriously.

Jeff Borman:

Here's the short and sweet, though. Right. Hotel companies think of themselves as such. Expedia and Booking do not. They are tech companies, so their adoption of AI was prior to our first conversation of AI. Right, expedia was a spinoff of Microsoft I mean, that was 30 years ago now but at the core of its company being, it's a tech company based in Seattle, and booking is not much different. It is a tech first company that figured out 30 years ago how to aggregate bookable content across 100,000 different hotels. So this is not outside the comfort zone for OTAs. In fact, it's right in their wheelhouse, whereas it forces major hotel companies to be different.

Matt Brown:

You know, fitting into their kind of personalities. Booking seems more focused on AI for the tech that drives internal productivity, especially for software engineers who use like coding assistance. Booking is using the technology more to improve its machine learning models and make them more agile, so I'm not saying they said that they're understanding traveler intent with the aim of making it easier to transact. You know you're featuring property benefits to show to a specific traveler. What do you think about other intermediaries in this space?

Jeff Borman:

Cvent is a company that touches 200,000 planners, sourcing 48 million room nights and $18 billion last year. They are making good use of their 200 staff that they've got dedicated to AI by launching Cvent IQ, which is embedding AI functionality through all their event management and sourcing platforms. So they're putting enhancements, including full 3D immersive visualization of event setups at every property, in their system. Ai generated event proposals. Think of how much time that saves the planner.

Jeff Borman:

Fast responses on the hotel side by allowing AI to respond to proposals or RFPs and as a result of fast responses, you know AI versus waiting for a human. It's also allowing hotels that engage that to trigger a top responder icon, which will compound more visibility to those properties because planners want their responses fast. So if the system works and organizers promote app downloads, it should improve the personalized summaries and make attendees more likely to use Cvent. What I've heard called the IKEA effect, which also suggests that people place higher value on the things they help create. Well, if AI helps a planner better create what they're driving toward as an output in their event again, that's going to be a virtuous cycle for a C-Event and they're on their way.

Matt Brown:

What about the traditional travel advisors?

Jeff Borman:

AI agents travel agents, if you will are starting to handle everything from customer service queries to qualifying sales leads, and it's reshaping the workforce. The question is whether those tools work for the human travel advisor or instead of the travel advisor. A lot of that still has to play out. Other cool applications that we're already seeing real-world usage are AI tour guides, real-time translation, smart glasses like Meta's Ray-Bans very soon change how we explore. I can see somebody creating a GPS-based system that acts as a guide. It'll see what the traveler's seeing through their lens and then narrate the history and the significance of what the person's looking at so closely to, as if you had a human guide right there with you.

Matt Brown:

Most of the industry uses Kodi to manage return on ad spend and digital spending, and Kodi is basically AI driven at this point. So, in many ways, a lot of hotels are too, because they depend on it so much. Besides that, what are large hotel brands doing today with AI?

Jeff Borman:

Outside of the paid media campaigns that Kodi is mostly operating for, most seem focused on AI to elevate guest experience through customer data, CRM, audience management, how to get more people in the loyalty program to monetize later, and focusing on brand voice. I think when we were talking about the OTAs earlier, the focus was a bit more transactional how to drive conversion through sites. Hilton has explicitly said that this is about making a better customer experience first. I read quotes from Mitch Shaw. Ataw, at noble hotel investment company, believes that brands will leverage ai to grow non-hotel accommodations, taking the 200 million loyalty members inside of honors or bonvoy and getting them into branded multi-family units, senior living and boat tours. And and the marriott bonvoy app is already going this direction. It uses AI-powered searches to personalize results for 140,000 home rental properties that are on its homes and villas platform.

Jeff Borman:

So I think there's some directional. How do you leverage the audience that they already have for non-hotel stays? Some of that's going on already and I think that on the big brand side of things, leveraging the data that they have because they have a treasure of data and leveraging that to drive better effectiveness of offers Don't place an expensive SEO strategy that reaches the top of the page for a shopper who may be so unlikely to convert that it isn't worth even the cost of an impression. You know, a fraction of a penny. What AI is being able to use the loyalty program data for is to get in front of people in a way that creates very cost-effective personalized offers to every guest. I think that's early stages, but it is happening.

Matt Brown:

Del Ross, who is kind of a digital marketing pioneer, in a recent article, gartner predicts that search engine volume will drop 25% in 2026. Wow, due to AI, chatbots and other virtual agents. I think that's true, because when was the last time you got on Google, everybody? And what's the first thing you see at the top there if you have a question, it's an AI generated answer that is attempting to kind of figure out what you're looking for 50% by 2028. Uh-oh. To mitigate this, I think it's critical for businesses to ensure that their websites are well optimized. Well, that's been the case for websites for 25 years, right, but now it's like well, okay, what does that mean? What do you think specifically hoteliers should be doing to kind of get ahead of what looks like this tidal wave of destruction that's coming for search?

Jeff Borman:

If we take this in categories, let's first say, format your content for AI readability. Again, the question here you're asking me is what to do today, right now. Add robust FAQ sections with concise answers. I think this is the number one thing I hear is probably the most common. Have landing pages with niche focus right. Romantic weekend ocean suite with fast Wi-Fi and great workstation. Be specific and be in the language that you want it to be presented. Break up content with headers, bullets, tables and call-outs that helps LLMs properly reproduce the verbiage that you want to have them present. Use plain language, no jargon, no fluff. Add micro-intense, pet-friendly hotel with fireplace in Tahoe right.

Matt Brown:

I'm fascinated by the idea that the future of advertising is. Being honest in the description of what you're advertising Location-rich descriptions right. Totally.

Jeff Borman:

Here's a really good example. Many brand sites are formatted in a way where it says pets and then it'll say colon yes or no. The users on the other end are just putting yes, no, or $25 fee and just like a dollar sign, 100. That is confusing. The proper response that AI is trying to give. What you do need now is not pets, yes, or pets and a price. It's pets are welcome and we have a welcome pet amenity $100 fee per animal under, you know, 100 pounds, Like the real language. Answer is what needs to get in there, Not just the fact that it's a hundred bucks to have your pet 10,000%.

Matt Brown:

In fact, the biggest search that I do when I travel with our dog, tilda, is I look for pet friendly. It needs to be pretty high up there, because if it's not, if I'm not getting immediately the answer that I need, I move on.

Jeff Borman:

Another thing I was recently reading is optimize the content to be skimmable by AI, and the specific action from that is to write in a conclusion first style. This is what you need to know, and then everything else else. A lot of our marketing copy today does the exact opposite. Lots of fluffy words meant for SEO and keyword optimization ultimately may be getting to a point of and don't forget to stay at our hotel In writing with a conclusion first style. Draft your content with a fear of TLDR, the too long didn't read. Ai does not want paragraphs. It wants really short, succinct. Give me the answer.

Jeff Borman:

Continuing down the line of content, Matt, enable integrated AI chat like Hi Jiffy, Book Me Bob, Ask Sweet onto your website. Create comparison content like this room is best for families, this room is best for romantic getaways. Leverage third-party sites to feed content into AI searches. So submit the most thorough listings to Google Travel, Bing Travel, Kayak, TripAdvisor. Submit media feeds to content aggregators like TripAdvisor and Hopper and OTAs. And use Google Business Profile Q&A section to its absolute fullest to populate the contents. This is where AIs are going to get the information you want them to respond to your shoppers with.

Matt Brown:

Wow, sounds easy. I'm sure they're all on this as we speak, and it's all stuff that humans have to do. Good news, everybody we still have to feed the robots material in order for them to do all the fancy things that we want them to do in the future.

Jeff Borman:

The points we just went through are but you have to feed it in a way that the robot can consume it For sure.

Matt Brown:

Roughly 30 to 40% of all the information that LLM's process comes from you guessed it Wikipedia. You know this is a move that is likely to save time and money in the race for AI supremacy, and that move is that AI tools are buying data directly from providers to fill data gaps. So you know, like Google's ongoing relationship with Reddit, or OpenAI's partnership with Foursquare for location data, bookingcom partnering with OpenAI for personalized travel recommendations. Jeff, is there anything? What else am I missing here? Those are kind of the big ones.

Jeff Borman:

I think the second section here, then, would be give careful consideration to structured content and metadata. The first thing we talked about was the natural verbiage that you use. The second, then, is things like number one schema. It helps LLMs better understand your content. Leverage structured data on pages so that machines can read them well. Validating schema using Google's rich results test. Ensure your photos and videos have descriptive alt text and file names. Geotag every image and media with a GPS location in the metadata. Place captions on all videos and optimize it for silent viewing. Host virtual tours or 360 content with descriptive metadata. Does the image of your pool have a metadata description? Rooftop infinity pool at Hotel X? This is the stuff that AIs will pick up on and help them give the results you're trying to give to shoppers.

Matt Brown:

It's going to be a ton of grunt work, but you have to do it. Actually, it won't be that bad. It's bad if you have a huge site. What you need is an AI to populate all this data for you, so you don't have to go in and tag everything yourself. So I'd like to. Maybe we should invest in that company. You can also leverage sites. Jeff, you found this and I'd never heard of this either. It's called Schema Markup Validator, to test the content you have. So here's a little rainbow. The more you know segment here Schema Markup Validator. This is not an ad. It'll test out what you got to see how you stack up. It turns out that 98% of AI traffic is sent by three chatbots, with chat GPT accounting for 50% alone. That is a lot of power and knowledge coming from one place, right when you're creating content.

Jeff Borman:

Authority has become once again a very significant part of search, if you want to say that significant part of search if you want to say that.

Jeff Borman:

So I think, matt. The third section to what can hotel teams and commercial leaders actually do today? Focus on what earns high authority in the AI mind, if you will. So earn backlinks from blogs and YouTube creators and Reddit threads. Brand mentions, ll. They look more LLMs, look to more human ways to understand authority. So making mentions or being mentioned by other sources is again back to extreme valuable. This renews the relevance of backlinking, which kind of faded away. It was big in the early days of SEO. It's really back. It's monitored. Brand mentions and travel forums and AI generated summaries with tools like brand 24. Don't just encourage guests to post good reviews on Google or TripAdvisor, but lead them to mention the specific experiences or attributes of the hotel, like loved the hotel. That's not going to get you anywhere. Loved the service at the pool, had a wonderful day, the margaritas were perfect, right Like that will then get you more credibility and authority. Ask influencers if you're working with them to describe your hotel naturally, in a natural human voice or conversational tone. Again, influencers, get rid of your fluff.

Matt Brown:

That's going to be a hard one, I think. Can you influence the?

Jeff Borman:

influencer. Emphasize local partnerships, local events, local businesses, and you will again earn higher authority by being affiliated with them. Repurpose hotel blogs into short, structured responses that AI can index. Embed at-a-glance widgets on your site a weather widget, walkability map, distance to key attractions and connecting to, like the backlinks again, other sites. That will give credibility to your statement.

Matt Brown:

Well, this is a lot of work to do, and I for one can't wait to get into it. I can't wait for other people to do it. Back to the main question, though. I mean, on top of all this, is there anything else that hotel commercial teams should be doing? You've lived in that world for a long time and so you know the day-to-day of what those teams are like. So what, realistically, should be kind of their best practices?

Jeff Borman:

You know, I think outside of the real hotel website stuff that we've just been talking about, kind of a loose hodgepodge of some other best practices going on right now. Track how your hotel appears in AI-generated answers. What are users actually seeing about your hotel? You can use perplexity, sge, chat, gpt. Second, if you can implement predictive text or auto-suggestions in your own search filter UX on your site, the more you can lead a shopper to what they want or what you think they'll want, the better. The third thing that comes to mind using AIs like Claude that excel at analysis or repetitive tasks, anything that involves analyzing the same data sets, weekly, monthly, etc. Star reports demand 360,. Perplexity is really good for that, so you can relieve yourself and find the efficiencies that you're looking for. Perplexity is really good for that, so you can relieve yourself and find the efficiencies that you're looking for. You can take data from Nolan, costar or Salesforce and regularly feed that into perplexity and provide your sales teams with sales leads. Finally, spidering Don't block the bots, matt.

Jeff Borman:

If you do, you will have no ability to appear in the answers that they generate. If you use a CDN content delivery network, it's a very good idea to confirm that they aren't blocking AI bots. To test this out, there's a company called CloudFair that has a useful tool called AI Audit and it'll show how and when different bots are hitting your site. There's a service called Scrunch. They can share how a company is appearing across various AI platform. Bridgeedge and SEMrush's Otterly product are providing similar reporting on GEO generative engine optimization, which is a variance of SEO reporting analytics. So don't block the bots. Know who's searching you. Know the results that are being provided back to them. It's a really good starting point to seeing how your customers are seeing you, I think.

Jeff Borman:

Finally, refresh the content. Often have timestamps on it and accuracy In all caps, matt. Accuracy. That's what you want your hotel guests to get. The right response when they say, does my hotel have a pool? And there's a image of a pool from 10 years ago, but you have since filled it in with concrete and turned it into a meeting room, it will turn that image into a word that says here's the pool at your hotel when you haven't had one in a decade. Be real careful about that stuff. You've got to be accurate.

Matt Brown:

You better watch out, man, because you're going to get. Look at all the homework here. You're going to start getting asked to be the AI expert about hotels on panels. So get ready, Get ready for that to come down your email chute.

Jeff Borman:

All right, Listen. Any interested party can simply replay this podcast. Matt, I have no mystery question for you today.

Matt Brown:

No right, I don't have a mystery question for you. Let's ask AI a mystery question. Sure, hold on, give me one second here. So what I'm putting in here, I'm not going to share which one I'm putting it in. Give me a mystery question about my travel likes or dislikes. Here's a mystery question to spark some self-discovery. Thanks, chatbot, chatgbt, claude Quote if someone followed the breadcrumbs of your favorite travel destinations, what secret pattern or hidden craving would they uncover? Thrill-seeking they use an em dash, of course. Thrill-seeking, solitude, indulgence or escape Dash of course, thrill, seeking solitude, indulgence or escape.

Jeff Borman:

I think the pattern if you took my whole life's travels, the pattern you'd find is that I'm going further and further off the grid of popular destinations and starting to actually loop back in to places I've been but want to explore more deeply. I've actually realized in my own travel pattern that I'm going to places now there's a reason I haven't been there and I'm going back and saying you know, italy is actually so wonderful and has so much more to offer. I want to do more of that than find the most remote place, the most remote island in the South Pacific, just because I'm feeling like an explorer. I'm actually going back to the places and getting deeper into them, instead of just more different places.

Matt Brown:

That's a good answer. If I had to choose from here thrill-seeking, solitude, indulgence or escape, I'd probably say a mix of solitude and escape. But my real answer would also include community. Strangely, I know it's weird to have solitude and community in the same thing, but Not if the voices in your head are as active as mine. Sure, tell me about it, get in line. See, this is going to be the future. It's the future of future. Travel right here, solitude, indulgence, escape and thrill seeking, and community and voices in your head.