AI is rapidly reshaping how travelers discover and choose hotels. Search is becoming more conversational, more useful, and more trusted. But for many hotels, appearing in AI-generated recommendations still feels like a lottery. That’s about to change, and the implications for every hotel’s Find, Book and Grow strategy are enormous.
NB: This is an article from Cendyn
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
Conversational AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, powered by the widely discussed large language models (LLMs), seem like an island. They’re busy answering questions from preparing travellers and guests. But it’s like a separate world, one that almost seems impenetrable.
People are changing habits in the way they search. It’s shifting from keywords to conversations. The result? People are receiving more enriched information. These conversational AI tools reopen the door to giving hotels back their distinction.
Conversational tools can now be accessed by hotels, bringing a critical opportunity to influence the results, to drive awareness and bookings. We’re doing this with Cendyn AI Connect through our partnership with DirectBooker. It’s the glue between hotels and AI, enabling hotels to take control of their brand story.
Where we’re coming from
It’s time for a mindset shift. We’ve been playing the search engine optimization (SEO) game in Google for decades. Trained to think in a keyword shorthand (“best hotels London”), both users and business owners understand that traditional search engines are all about visibility.
With the conversational approach that AI chat tools bring, online search is moving towards enriching back and forth exchanges. Conversational AI is bringing the joy back to the search, the journey, and the discovery. We’re getting the energy back that we put in.
Humans are innately language-driven. That’s why people are so readily ditching keyword shorthand to ask detailed questions. For travelers, this means asking for the best hotels with good restaurants nearby in specific neighbourhoods, or hotel rooms that have space for a cot, a bathtub and good blackout curtains when planning travel with a young family. They want to have a conversation with search. Naturally, hotels want to be part of that conversation. Doing so is an incredible opportunity to radiate confidence and distinction.
Conversational AI tools originally took their information from what they were trained on, which is more or less anything that has been published on the wider web. Online travel agents (OTAs) have had a head start, as ready-made directories of hotel listings and key data that the AI can easily access. They’re seen as an authority, and there’s a perception they hold a high level of data.
In reality, OTAs give the shopping list, but not the recipe. Telling an AI tool that a hotel has three swimming pools ticks boxes, but it doesn’t tell guests anything about the experience they’ll have. It’s like a dating app. Profile data gives the attributes – brown hair /blue eyes/ 5’7” but actually tells you nothing about the person. Superficial, surface level.
Hotels know their guest profile and target audience intimately. They know better than anyone the hotel experience. And here lies the opportunity, where conversation and chat help hoteliers bring this personality to life.
