The AI booking shift: What hoteliers need to do now

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, and Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA, tackle the most significant structural shift in hotel distribution since the rise of online travel agencies: the emergence of AI as a primary channel for travel discovery and booking. With Google's recent expansion of hotel booking into its Universal Commerce Protocol, the race to show up in AI search is no longer hypothetical. Karen and Dylan trace how this shift evolved, where it is headed, and why hotels that act now will hold a structural advantage over those still optimizing for yesterday's search landscape.

What you'll learn:

● Google's UCP and what it means for direct bookings: How Google's move to bring hotel booking into its AI-powered Universal Commerce Protocol marks a genuine turning point in where and how guests discover hotels, and why hoteliers who are paying attention have an early-mover advantage.

● The AI-to-agent booking future: What it would look like for guests to use personal AI bots that search and book travel on their behalf, and why hotels need to be discoverable by machines, not just by humans, for that future to work in their favor.

● OTAs and AI: coexistence over disruption: Why Booking.com and other major OTAs with deep infrastructure are more likely to partner with platforms like ChatGPT than compete with them, and what that means for hotel distribution strategy right now.

● Conversational search and long-tail discoverability: How the shift from keyword search to natural language queries changes the way hotels need to structure their website content and FAQs to show up when AI agents are searching.

● The five foundations every hotel needs: Clean first-party data, a robust CRM or CDP, a direct booking experience that converts, structured website content, and smart reputation management — the checklist for competing in an AI-first distribution world.

● AI applications hoteliers are using today: From automated upsells and multilingual communications to campaign optimization and call center augmentation, the practical ways AI is already lifting hotel revenue and reducing operational costs.

● Why the next 12 months matter more than the next five years: How hoteliers entering budget season can prioritize their investments to build the foundation they need before the competitive window narrows further.

● First-party data as a strategic asset: As global privacy regulations tighten, the data you own is the only data you can reliably act on, and a CRM or CDP is what makes that asset actionable at scale.

● The real cost of accepting OTA dependency: Why settling for OTA volume without fighting to win back a meaningful percentage of direct business leaves real revenue uncaptured every season.

Karen and Dylan also discuss the generational divide in travel booking behavior, why luxury travelers are likely to keep humans in the loop longer than budget travelers, and how the experiences of major chains investing heavily in AI create both a threat and a playbook for independent properties.

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Episode Highlights

[03:16] The moment AI moved from research to reservations - For years, AI's role in travel was largely about discovery. Dylan pinpoints the shift when AI started moving into the comparison and booking phases, with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol as the clearest signal yet. "We're starting to see it move more towards booking directly in the AI. So that's gonna be a huge shift. And we're obviously just in the beginning of all this, but think about where we're gonna be in like five, ten years." This is the context that makes everything else in the episode actionable.

[07:52] The wife bot and the personal AI travel agent - When Karen introduces the concept of AI-to-agent vacation booking, Dylan responds with characteristic honesty before zeroing in on what it means for hoteliers: "I already think that this might help my marriage because I already rely on my wife bot who is much better at planning than me." The punchline lands, but his operational point lands harder: hotels need to be visible to AI agents that shop on behalf of guests, not just to the guests themselves.

[11:36] Why Booking.com isn't going anywhere - Dylan offers the most grounding reframe of the episode on the OTA question every hotelier is privately asking. "I don't see a world where all of a sudden we wake up and Booking.com is gone. They have 24,000 employees there. They do a lot of things beyond just the booking itself." His argument is that OTAs and AI platforms are converging toward a partnership model, and the opportunity for hotels is to claim discoverability ground in that new architecture before OTAs do.

[19:54] The grocery store problem with hotel AI - Dylan opens his answer to "what should hotels prioritize?" with a story about a grocery chain that deployed AI for recipe recommendations with messy underlying data and ended up suggesting cleaning products be mixed with pasta sauce. "The idea was great, but the data was bad." It is the cleanest possible metaphor for why no AI strategy works without a clean data foundation first, and it reframes the entire conversation about technology investment sequencing.

[28:44] Don't hand your guests to the OTAs - Dylan closes with the most direct call to action in the episode, urging hoteliers to resist the passive acceptance of OTA dependency. "I would encourage this industry to make sure that we don't let this opportunity — to take control of our business and our data and our relationship with our guests — for granted, and let's act and make sure that we stake our claim to what we deserve." With AI reshaping discoverability in real time, acting now is the difference between staking a claim and playing catch-up.

Chapters:
00:00 - How AI is changing hotel booking discovery
03:16 - Google's Universal Commerce Protocol announcement
07:52 - The future of AI-to-agent vacation booking
11:36 - OTAs and LLMs: coexistence, not competition
15:44 - Optimizing your content for conversational AI search
19:54 - Building the data foundation hotels need now
26:14 - How to prepare for the next 12 months

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.

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Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.

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