Hotels must rethink content for the AI that searches them

Your hotel's content isn't written for machines that read and summarize it. That's a growing problem. IHG already sees how Google-powered conversational search on its own site changes what works: descriptions that work for a human scrolling photos don't translate well when an AI has to parse them, summarize them, and serve them as a direct answer in a chat. Kim Smith, SVP of Digital Direct Channels at IHG, warns that hoteliers need to restructure information entirely. Less prose, more data. Less vagueness, more specificity. It's almost like re-tagging everything from scratch.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Ads across 31 European countries starting next week. Hotels that haven't thought through what this means for distribution will wake up to uncomfortable questions: where do my properties appear? What description does the bot show? Who pays when someone clicks?. Here's the twist: Stripe just bought OpenRouter for $7 billion, a platform that abstracts the cost of AI models. Why does that matter? It introduces pricing opacity into AI payments. If Stripe is your processor and OpenRouter is the layer hiding how much each model call costs, then nobody knows for sure what you're actually paying for your own searches and recommendations.

For a hotelier, the lesson is straightforward: learning to work with AI as a distribution channel is no longer optional. Start auditing what data of yours the bots read, how they structure it, what your guests see when they ask the chat. If you want to sell direct and compete with OTAs that already own this playbook, your content needs to be machine-ready now.