I spent some time going through the data dump OpenAI published about how people use ChatGPT (they call it Signals). I was hoping for a travel section. There isn’t one. There’s no travel category, no destinations and nothing on hotels. It’s higher level than that, which is a pity.
So the first thing to say is that whenever you see “X% of ChatGPT is travel” in the coming weeks, it’s a guess. Maybe an educated one, but a guess.
What the data does show is intent: what people are trying to do when they open it. I focused on one group, people seeking information, because I think they’re the ones most likely to be planning something, a trip included. Seeking information is now about 20% of all messages, up from 16.7% in July 2024. About three quarters of it has nothing to do with work (apparently a lot of people are “expressing” themselves to ChatGPT, I have opinions on that).
Anyhow, I asked three questions, the same ones you’d ask before opening a shop on a new street. Who walks by? What are they looking for? And can I actually put a sign in front of them? I made some charts to visualize them better:
Where are they? The share of info-seeking varies a lot by country. In Q3, Spain (26.3%) and France (26.1%) led the big markets, ahead of the UK (23.0%), Germany (22.9%) and the US (21.0%). India and Brazil are down around 16%. You can see this in the quadrant chart above.
How old are they? Info-seeking rises with age. It’s 18.1% of messages from 18–24 year olds against 25.2% for 55–64 year olds. So the older users are the ones asking.
Which plan are they on? This is the one that matters for ads, because only two plans show them: Free and Go (the $8 one). Plus and Pro don’t. And this is where the data goes quiet. There’s no breakdown of how many people are on each plan, by country or otherwise. All we know is that Free is the most personal use (about 75% non-work) and Pro the least (68% work).
Let’s take an example. Say your hotel is in Paris and most of your guests are American. 46% of US ChatGPT messages come from people aged 35 and over, which I’d assume is roughly the group that can afford a high-end hotel in a big European city. About 21% of US messages are seeking information. So far, so good.
But how many of them are on a free account? We don’t know. And I wonder: if someone has the money for a high-end hotel in Paris, are they using the free version? Or are they paying $20 a month and never seeing an ad? Maybe the free user with money is more common than we think, since plenty of people don’t pay for software they use casually. I honestly don’t know. That’s food for thought.
So should you invest in Chat GPT ads?
I don’t think we can reason our way to an answer, the data wont tell us. At this point I would recommend to test: a small test with a leisure segment in one or two source markets, measured with the usual caveats. But it’s early so don’t expect miracles, expect to learn.
Before that, go through the numbers yourself. The data is public. Take your top three or four source markets, look at the age mix and how much of their usage is info-seeking, and check whether your guests even look like the typical ChatGPT user there. A hotel in Seville with mostly German guests in their fifties will see a very different picture than a hostel in Lisbon full of 25-year-olds.
It doesn’t give all the answers, but it gives something, and that’s more than we had before.
