If you’re still thinking of AI as a feature, you’re already behind. This is not “innovation.” This is not “a tool.” This is a control shift – upstream – at the moment where guests decide what’s worth considering. And here’s the part that will ruin someone’s year.
NB: This is an articles from Americas Great Resorts
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By the time many luxury hotel operators register what AI is doing to guest acquisition, the damage may already be structural.
- Less gradual.
- Less theoretical.
- Increasingly structural.
When it finally shows up in your reports – OTAs share increassed, less direct discovery, higher acquisition costs – you won’t be looking at a clean fix. You’ll be looking at expensive compensation. You’ll likely pay a toll to AI intermediaries for the privilege of being mentioned.
And the final insult is how accountability works: it won’t matter who set this in motion. It won’t matter that it was “legacy.” It won’t matter that the market changed.
When the board asks why you didn’t see it coming – and why you didn’t move before it was obvious – there’s no predecessor in the room. There’s only you. The hospitality industry is talking about AI as if it’s a feature.
It isn’t. It’s an upstream control shift.
LLMs – Large Language Models – aren’t just chatbots. Paired with retrieval, ranking layers, and commerce integrations, they increasingly mediate early-stage decisions. And whoever influences that recommendation layer tends to shape demand.
For the past two decades, OTAs have dominated much of online distribution. Over the next five years, expect them to compete to influence decision formation. That is not evolution. That is a structural shift in bargaining power.
Most hotel operators are still modeling OTAs as expensive booking channels. That mental model is already obsolete.
The Real Shift: From Browsing to Asking
Historically, travel discovery worked like this:
- A guest searched.
- They clicked around.
- They compared multiple properties.
- They opened tabs.
- They read reviews.
- They filtered results.
- Eventually, they decided.
That entire cognitive process is compressing. Guest behavior is shifting toward more conversational, query-driven discovery alongside traditional search:
The guest asks.
“Find me a quiet luxury resort with ocean views, adults-only energy, and a serious spa.”
LLM-style interfaces often narrow discovery to a short list – commonly just a handful of options – reducing the multi-tab comparison that used to dominate.
- Less browsing.
- Less comparison marathon.
- Fewer open tabs.
AI increasingly becomes the interface. And the interface increasingly shapes the decision.
