Yesterday, I shared a surprising finding: Only 4% of major hotel brands provide AI-ready data instantly—the story underneath the tech points to a major hotel industry disruption.
Here’s what we saw:
🔵 Big chain websites had technical barriers that led AI to miss key data even when it was present on the page to human inspection. These included JavaScript-heavy frameworks, high levels of firewall security, and rigid brandwide schema.
But these are deliberate choices about much more than technology.
🔵 Big Brands as Mini-OTAs and disruptive technology: It’s no surprise that the rise in large chains of brands, operating as franchise companies (e.g., Hilton, Marriott International) has coincided with the OTA era. Big hotel chains, from an online perspective, are essentially mini-OTAs. And I mean this as a complement.
In a big-chain world, Marriott’s Bonvoy hotels act as a team to pull some guests away from Hilton or Hyatt, but mostly from independents and OTAs. For many hotels, joining a big-brand “team” effectively reduces its individual distribution costs. Want proof? When Marriott buys your branded search terms, they send clicks to a Bonvoy search page, not your individual hotel. This works. Your spillover helps other Bonvoy properties, and vice versa. It stays within the team.
This strategy successfully drove hotel discovery in the SEO and SEM era. But fighting as a team is a strategy built for visibility in an internet based on online marketplaces read by humans, not one where AI can dive much deeper, much faster.
AI-powered discovery won’t wait for slow or restricted data access—it moves swiftly to sources offering immediate, detailed answers, about individual properties.
The takeaway for brands: It’s time to reassess how brand-first web architecture is used in an AI search era. We have opinions.
👉 Interested in preparing your hotel or brand for AI discovery? Let’s connect—drop me a DM.
