Hotels were late to the internet. Late to mobile. This time can be different.

A few months ago I was at Web Summit in Lisbon, soaking wet, ducking between stages in the rain. Inside, every panel was about AI. Big predictions. Bold hypotheticals. Lots of hand-waving about what might happen someday.

Meanwhile, travelers were already asking ChatGPT where to stay tonight.

We keep making the same mistake

Twenty years ago, Google was "just a search engine." Hotels that figured it out early dominated results and owned demand for years. Everyone else spent the next two decades paying for it.

The same thing happened with OTAs. With mobile. With metasearch. Every time a new channel shows up, our industry watches from the sidelines, waits for proof and then scrambles to catch up after someone else has locked in the advantage.

ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in 17 months. The window hotels had to crack Google SEO lasted a decade. This one won't be nearly that generous.

The shift isn't coming. It's here.

According to new research from Phocuswright, 15% of consumers are now using AI platforms like ChatGPT specifically to shop for travel. That number has doubled in a short period, and it's coming directly at the expense of traditional search. Google is losing ground. Overall, 39% of travelers are using AI somewhere in their planning journey, whether that's through AI-powered search, on an OTA or through a platform like ChatGPT directly.

That's not a trend to monitor. That's a channel to show up in.

And when someone asks an AI assistant "Where should I stay in Barcelona?", that AI isn't browsing hotel websites. It's pulling from structured data, review sites and OTAs. If your hotel isn't in a format AI can read and trust, you don't exist in that conversation.

The OTAs aren't waiting. Booking.com and Expedia launched as day-one ChatGPT App partners. They showed up at the exact moment travelers are deciding where to book. Most hotels haven't.

We're solving for the wrong problem

Walk any trade show floor right now and you'll see chatbots, virtual concierges, AI-powered revenue management. All necessary. But it's all solving for guests who already found you.

Nobody's asking about the guests who never will.

The questions that actually matter

Forget "should we invest in AI?" Ask "can AI find us?"

Is your property data structured and current everywhere, or scattered and stale? Do you control your brand story in the places AI pulls from, or are third-party descriptions doing the talking? Can AI book your hotel directly, or does every path run through an intermediary?

The answers tell you exactly where you stand.

The pattern doesn't have to repeat

I've spent over 15 years in technology. Long enough to recognize patterns and long enough to be tired of watching the same one play out. A new channel emerges, incumbents wait, somebody else ends up owning the customer relationship.

At Lighthouse, that pattern is why we built Connect AI. It connects hotels directly to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini so that when a traveler asks where to stay, the AI gets its answer straight from the hotel. Live rates, real availability, the hotel's own story. Not scraped from a review site. Not filtered through an OTA. The hotel controls what AI knows about it, and the booking stays direct.

Regardless of what tools you use, the reality is the same. AI is reshaping how travelers discover hotels right now. The hotels that show up early will shape what AI learns to recommend. The ones that wait will spend the next decade wondering why they didn't move sooner.

-Adam Swart

Head of Brand and Content at Lighthouse

P.S. On February 25, Carrie Ell, Mercedes Blanco and I are hosting a live session where we'll show exactly how Connect AI works and how to make your hotel discoverable in ChatGPT. Join us here.