AI Is Deciding Which Hotels Get Considered — Hospitality Revenue Leaders Need a Budget Response

Skift Take AI is pushing hotel discovery earlier in the traveler journey, forcing commercial leaders to rethink who owns visibility, how to measure success, and whether more budget should move upstream before demand reaches traditional booking channels. This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner. Brand awareness has always provided a degree of protection in travel. Large global hotel companies benefit from years of accumulated recognition, loyalty membership, and direct demand. Independent and regional lodging brands have less room for error. If they’re not surfaced when travelers research destinations, resorts, or experiences, they may never enter the conversation. That challenge is becoming more urgent as AI changes how travelers discover and compare options. Recommendations are increasingly formed before a traveler reaches an OTA, a metasearch site, or a hotel website. According to research from Curacity and Cornell, 94% of hotels are invisible in AI search results. A property that never enters the consideration set creates no demand for the direct channel to capture. What started as a marketing question about visibility is becoming a broader commercial issue that touches revenue, distribution, CRM, business intelligence, and content strategy. Hospitality companies are already responding by rethinking how and where they invest across the traveler journey. Skift Studio spoke with Jenna Villalobos, senior vice president and chief revenue officer at Outrigger Hospitality Group, and Lance Burton, vice president of marketing at Remington Hotels, to understand how hotel brands are approaching those decisions. The Ownership Question For all the discussion around AI-driven discovery, one question remains surprisingly unresolved within many hotel organizations: who is actually responsible for ensuring a property gets discovered? Villalobos admits she hadn’t formally considered it until this conversation. Visibility is a priority across the business at Outrigger Hospitality Group, but responsibility is divided among multiple teams by channel. Search engine optimization and LLM visibility sit with the product and analytics teams, while relationships with OTAs and third-party channels fall under revenue. Each function measures and improves visibility in its own area, but no single team owns it as a single commercial objective. “I really like this question because it made me stop and think about who actually owns visibility,” Villalobos said. “Different teams own different pieces of it. We’ll likely formalize that with our analytics team because they’re the ones pulling the data and identifying the opportunities. That’s where the rubber meets the road with measuring.” For Burton, managing a portfolio of properties across multiple brands adds another layer of complexity because visibility depends on the work of multiple teams. “The hotel website, technical setup, relevant content, reviews, and guest experience all matter,” he said. “In practice, marketing often ends up as the quarterback because online channels have traditionally sat under digital marketing, but the work must be cross-functional.” Discovery Has Become a Team Sport As discovery moves earlier in the traveler journey, the functions that influence it are becoming more closely connected. Villalobos describes Outrigger’s commercial operation as a coordinated effort. Revenue, CRM, direct channel technology, and business intelligence work together continuously, sharing information and adjusting plans as booking patterns change. That collaboration has changed how Outrigger thinks about investment across the traveler journey. The company plans activity across the full funnel, from early inspiration through to conversion. The goal is to build demand before occupancy gaps appear. “We’re trying to build the base and plan ahead,” Villalobos said. “We still invest heavily in the mid and lower funnel, but we’re putting more emphasis on the upper funnel because that’s where future demand starts.” One of those upper funnel investments is Outrigger’s work with Curacity, which places the brand in third-party editorial environments designed to influence travelers before they begin comparing hotels. Villalobos described it as a way of reaching travelers who may not yet have decided on a destination. “As an independent brand, awareness has always mattered for us,” she said. “Curacity has helped us get our story into the hands of trusted third-party writers, and we’ve seen our direct business grow as a result. It’s also changed how we think about content. We now value third-party storytelling that inspires people to choose a destination or start planning a trip.” She believes authenticity has become even more valuable as AI-generated content becomes easier to produce. Burton makes a similar point. As travelers ask AI tools more open-ended questions, hotels need to appear in a wider range of contexts than they did when discovery depended mainly on keyword searches. “In highly competitive markets, hotels need stronger storytelling, stronger website content, and better presence across social media and earned media channels like travel publications and blogs,” he said. “Independent hotels often have to work harder for visibility, but they also usually have more room to tell a distinctive story and highlight experiences people naturally want to share.” The Budget Decision The operational changes taking place inside hospitality ultimately lead to a financial one. If discovery now begins before a traveler reaches a booking channel, should commercial investment move there too? That question is sharpened by what’s happening in traditional search more broadly. SparkToro’s analysis of clickstream data found that 68% of U.S. Google searches now end without a click to any website — up from 60% just two years earlier, the fastest acceleration the firm has recorded. AI Overviews are driving most of that shift, and their presence alone cuts click-through rate by roughly 60%. For hotel brands, that’s less an argument for new spend than a case for moving existing dollars to where consideration is actually happening. For Villalobos, the answer is not about abandoning the lower funnel. Conversion, direct bookings, and distribution remain central to Outrigger’s strategy. The question is deciding how much more attention should be given to the stages that influence consideration before a traveler is ready to book. “Most of our budget still goes toward the middle and lower funnel, but we’re testing new ways to amplify our message earlier in the traveler journey,” she said. Those discussions are influencing how Outrigger is allocating its 2027 commercial budget. In addition to its existing commercial activity, the company is testing new approaches to AI-driven discovery, including generative engine optimization (GEO) through Curacity VISTA, which builds visibility within the trusted editorial sources that increasingly inform AI-generated travel recommendations. “We’re testing the LLM and GEO space because we think it’s important to understand where it’s going,” Villalobos said. “Curacity is already included in our budget for next year.” The Measurement Problem Those investments also require a different approach to measurement. For years, hospitality has relied heavily on attribution models that reward the last click before a booking. That works well for paid search, branded search, or other channels close to conversion. It says much less about the activities that influenced a traveler weeks before they chose a destination or hotel. “Travelers don’t make decisions in a single moment,” Villalobos said. “They encounter your brand in lots of different places before they book, and that’s what we need to measure.” That creates a challenge for commercial leaders. They’re expected to grow direct bookings while keeping acquisition costs under control, yet many of the activities that influence those outcomes happen weeks before a reservation is made and don’t fit neatly into traditional attribution models. According to Burton, the tension usually appears during budget discussions. “The biggest constraint I hear is that owners want measurable ROI and they want it quickly,” he said. “Optimizing for AI is a long-tail effort, much like traditional SEO. It should be treated as a long-term investment.” Planning for an AI-Driven Market Commercial budgets for 2027 will determine how hotel companies respond as AI becomes a larger part of travel discovery. The question for many hotel brands, especially those without global name recognition, is how much investment should continue to flow toward demand capture and how much should shift toward demand creation. The media sources informing AI recommendations are increasingly establishing their place in the traveler journey. Brands that invest in those channels now will have more opportunity to understand how they contribute to commercial performance. Brands that remain focused only on downstream channels risk spending more to convert a shrinking pool of demand. See where your brand shows up in AI search. Book a demo at curacity.com This content was created collaboratively by Curacity and Skift Studio.