Who Gets Paid When AI Books Your Hotel Room?

ChatGPT is now booking your hotel room. Google's AI Mode does it too. And nobody, not the hotels, not the platforms, not the AI makers, has figured out who gets paid when that happens.

The agentic booking question haunts the industry right now. You've got three models colliding: Does the commission go to the AI provider (OpenAI, Google)? To the channel through which the AI found your property? To both? Does the hotel eat it as a cost of being AI-discoverable? The financial gap between these scenarios is enormous. A 15% OTA commission looks tame next to the negotiations hotels will need to have when a third party controls the final booking moment.

This is where the revenue management world gets uncomfortable. Your team has spent years optimizing commissions down to decimal points across Booking, Expedia, direct channels. Now there's a new layer nobody understands yet. Hotels need to stop waiting for clarity and start demanding it from their tech partners, right now, before you're locked into bad terms with distribution channels you don't even know you're using.

The winners will be the operators who negotiate commission structure before the AI integration, not after.