For the better part of two decades, hospitality brands have competed for visibility on the same handful of surfaces: search engine rankings, online travel agency (OTA) listings, review platforms, and paid digital channels. The playbook was well understood, and the metrics were familiar.
That playbook is under pressure.
Travelers are increasingly beginning their planning not with a search engine, but with a conversation. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar platforms are now fielding questions that used to belong exclusively to Google: Which Las Vegas hotel has the best spa and dining experience? What are the top family-friendly resorts in Scottsdale? Where should I stay in Nashville for a business trip? The traveler asking those questions receives a curated shortlist in return, often before they visit a single brand website, OTA, or booking engine.
New consumer research commissioned by Rezolve Ai offers a window into how quickly this shift is moving. In a survey of 1,500 U.S. online shoppers conducted in December 2025, 61% reported using AI tools during the holiday season, and one in five used ChatGPT, Claude, or similar platforms specifically for product advice and recommendations. That behavior is not confined to retail. The same consumers researching purchases through AI assistants are the travelers researching hotels, destinations, and experiences through those same platforms.
The scale of the shift becomes clearer alongside findings from Bain & Company, which found that 68% of large language model users already use AI platforms to research and gather information, and 42% use them for shopping and purchase recommendations. McKinsey has described this moment as the emergence of a new front door to the internet, one where AI platforms increasingly act as the first point of contact between consumers and the brands they are evaluating.
For hospitality, the implications are specific. Traditional search delivers a long list of options and places the traveler in control of filtering. AI-generated discovery delivers a shortlist, and the platform makes the first cut. Brands that appear in those responses are in the consideration set. Brands that do not may be excluded before a traveler ever engages directly with a website, OTA, or booking engine. And for operators who have navigated that visibility challenge, the expectations AI creates do not stop at the booking confirmation.
The Rezolve Ai research also surfaces an important distinction. Trust in retail chatbots remains low, with only 39% of consumers trusting chatbots when shopping online. But trust in AI agents for pre-purchase research tasks tells a different story: 78% said they would trust an AI agent to handle product comparison and recommendations before reaching a checkout screen. Travelers using ChatGPT or Perplexity to research where to stay are not interacting with a retailer’s chatbot. They are consulting what they perceive as a knowledgeable, neutral advisor, and 58% believe AI agents are more likely to find a better deal than they can on their own.
Not all AI is equal in this context, and hospitality leaders are right to make that distinction. General-purpose AI systems can generate plausible-sounding responses that misquote rates, fabricate policies, or contradict brand standards. For operators where pricing precision and brand consistency are non-negotiable, the relevant question is not whether a platform uses AI, but what that AI is trained on, what live data it has access to, and how it handles the gap between what it knows and what it does not.
The hospitality industry has adapted to every major digital transition of the past 25 years, from the rise of OTAs to the shift to mobile booking to the proliferation of loyalty ecosystems. Each transition created new winners and real pressure on organizations that were slow to respond. AI-mediated discovery is following a similar pattern.
For commercial, digital, and marketing leaders, the near-term priority is visibility: understanding how your brand appears across AI-generated recommendations today, where gaps exist relative to competitors, and what that means for demand generation and direct booking performance over the next 12 to 24 months.
The question is no longer whether AI will influence where travelers stay. For a growing share of travelers, it already does.
Sources
Rezolve Ai Consumer Survey, conducted by Method Research and distributed by PureSpectrum, n=1,500 U.S. adults who shop online, December 2025.
McKinsey & Company, “The New Front Door to the Internet: Winning in the Age of AI Search.”
Bain & Company, “Consumer Reliance on AI Search Results Signals New Era of Marketing,” 2025.
