AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
Santa Caterina Hotel was the biggest mover with 14 mentions (+10 WoW). 5 hotels appeared in the top 200 for the first time.
46% of ChatGPT captures in the 25 August run came back without their retrieval layer
Since 17 August, ChatGPT has been returning two different response shapes. In the run of **25 August 2026**, **283 of 616** captures carried the answer and its cited links but no retrieval trace — no record of the searches issued or the sources consulted — averaging **3.0 citations against 10.2** for the full ones. The thin responses are genuinely thinner, not merely less transparent. **Retrieved-vs-cited and map-entity figures for ChatGPT are withheld for that run**; hotel mentions, answer text and ad placements are unaffected and reported as normal. The other five assistants show no change. The cause is open with our data provider — early signs point to a difference between signed-in and signed-out sessions, so we are not calling it a fault yet.
We flag every affected capture in the database so it is excluded from retrieval rates rather than counted as a zero.
The 616 prompts we ask every week
56 destinations × 11 templates. Each prompt has structured dimensions: city, country, region, persona (couples / families / solo / business), budget (luxury / mid / budget), and location zoom (wide city vs neighborhood vs landmark). Control prompts are unmodified baselines.
Every destination below gets the same 11 question types — just with the city name swapped in. That's how 56 destinations × 11 templates = 616 prompts per platform per week.
- luxury hotels in <city>
- family friendly hotels in <city>
- hotels in <city> with rooftop pool
- hotels near <neighborhood>, <city>
- boutique hotels in <neighborhood>, <city>
- best hotels in <city> for solo travelers
- best hotels in <city>
- affordable hotels in <city> under $200
- best hotels in <city> for couples
- best hotels in <city> for business travelers
- best hotels in <neighborhood>, <city>
- hotels near <city> National Park
africa4 destinations · 44 prompts
americas14 destinations · 154 prompts
Each destination is asked the 11 prompt patterns above (11 prompts × 14 cities = 154 prompts in this region).
asia16 destinations · 176 prompts
europe17 destinations · 187 prompts
oceania5 destinations · 55 prompts
Each destination is asked the 11 prompt patterns above (11 prompts × 5 cities = 55 prompts in this region).
Named hotels of the week
Hotels worth calling out individually. Computed across all 6 AI assistants — when a hotel ranks high here it's mentioned by multiple models, not just one.
Most-mentioned hotel across all 616 prompts this week, blended across every AI assistant.
Wasn't on the radar last week. Newcomers gated to ≥15 mentions this week.
High-confidence cross-city detection lands with the May 18 run. We'll surface only mentions where the AI-named hotel exists in a different city than the prompt asked about — clean signal, no false positives from address formatting.
| # | Hotel | City | Country | ChatGPT | Gemini | Perplexity(paused) | Grok(discontinued) | Copilot | Google AI Mode | Total | Link mix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | SG | 10 | 2 | — | — | 6 | 6 | 24 | Direct 83%OTA 4%Other 13% |
| 2 | The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai | Mumbai | IN | 5 | 2 | — | — | 7 | 5 | 19 | Direct 89%Other 11% |
| 3 | Marina Bay Sands Singapore | 10 Bayfront Ave | SG | 5 | 2 | — | — | 6 | 5 | 18 | Direct 78%OTA 6%Other 17% |
| 4 | Peridot Grand Luxury Boutique Hotel | Ha Noi | VN | 5 | 2 | — | — | 5 | 6 | 18 | Direct 56%OTA 22%Other 22% |
| 5 | THE OMNIA | Zermatt | CH | 6 | 1 | — | — | 5 | 5 | 17 | Direct 76%OTA 6%Other 18% |
| 6 | Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin | Berlin | DE | 4 | 5 | — | — | 4 | 4 | 17 | Direct 71%Other 29% |
| 7 | Hilton Beijing Wangfujing | Dongcheng | CN | 2 | 3 | — | — | 7 | 4 | 16 | Direct 81%Other 19% |
| 8 | Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing Beijing | Dongcheng | CN | 6 | 1 | — | — | 5 | 4 | 16 | Direct 88%Other 13% |
| 9 | Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | Ha Noi | VN | 5 | 2 | — | — | 4 | 3 | 14 | Direct 57%Other 43% |
| 10 | Santa Caterina Hotel | Amalfi | IT | 5 | — | — | — | 6 | 3 | 14 | Direct 93%OTA 7% |
| 11 | The Langham Gold Coast | Surfers Paradise | AU | 6 | — | — | — | 5 | 3 | 14 | Direct 93%Other 7% |
| 12 | The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore | Marina Bay | SG | 5 | 2 | — | — | 3 | 4 | 14 | Direct 79%OTA 7%Other 14% |
| 13 | Hilton Auckland | Auckland | NZ | 2 | 2 | — | — | 4 | 5 | 13 | Direct 77%OTA 8%Other 15% |
| 14 | Hotel Marina Riviera | Amalfi | IT | 2 | 1 | — | — | 7 | 3 | 13 | Direct 69%OTA 23%Other 8% |
| 15 | Anantara Convento di Amalfi Grand Hotel | Amalfi | IT | 5 | — | — | — | 5 | 3 | 13 | Direct 100% |
| 16 | QT Gold Coast | Surfers Paradise | AU | 4 | 2 | — | — | 5 | 2 | 13 | Direct 77%Other 23% |
| 17 | The Peninsula Beijing | Dongcheng | CN | 6 | — | — | — | 5 | 1 | 12 | Direct 83%OTA 8%Other 8% |
| 18 | The Silo Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | ZA | 6 | 1 | — | — | 2 | 3 | 12 | Direct 75%OTA 8%Other 17% |
| 19 | The Peninsula Hong Kong | Tsim Sha Tsui | HK | 3 | 2 | — | — | 5 | 2 | 12 | Direct 83%Other 17% |
| 20 | Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong | Central | HK | 4 | — | — | — | 5 | 3 | 12 | Direct 100% |
Link mix over time — top hotels
Where each AI sent users in recent weeks: direct site, OTA, chain page, or other.Direct vs OTA — who controls the link?
When an AI hands a user a hotel link, does it send them to the brand (own site or chain page) or to an OTA reseller? Bars fold chain into direct.Week by week. Google is split out of what used to be counted as “other”: a link to google.com from an AI assistant is the assistant keeping the click, which is worth seeing on its own rather than filed under the vaguest available label. Metasearch (trivago, kayak) stays in other — those are third-party marketplaces, not the engine linking to itself.
One note on the other line, because it used to be the least trustworthy series here. “Other” is every link we cannot place as the hotel’s own site, an OTA, a chain page or Google — so it is partly a measure of our own coverage, not only of engine behaviour. It previously showed a band of 45–65% between 08 June and 27 July that we could not explain. That band was a bug on our side, and it is now fixed. Google AI Mode returns hotel websites as bare domains (ritzcarlton.com) rather than full URLs, and the query that derives the domain for classification expects a scheme — so 16,194 perfectly classifiable links, every one of them AI Mode, were counted as “other” purely for lacking an https://. Those URLs have been normalised, the ingest no longer stores them scheme-less, and every week has been rebuilt: other is now 3.5% across all engines and weeks, and the band is gone. Read direct and OTA as behavioural; still read a move in other as measurement first.
Weeks with no classified links are omitted rather than drawn as zero — a missing run and a genuinely zero week look identical on a chart, and only one of them is a finding. Link volume per week: 05-04 21,899 · 05-11 15,587 · 05-18 15,218 · 05-25 12,571 · 06-01 11,244 · 06-08 11,444 · 06-15 11,494 · 06-22 10,881 · 06-29 11,804 · 07-06 12,237 · 07-13 11,233 · 07-20 11,794 · 07-27 12,283 · 08-03 12,086 · 08-10 11,585 · 08-17 11,462 · 08-24 10,747 · 08-31 14,852 · 09-07 8,534 · 09-14 7,998 · 09-21 8,271 · 09-28 8,113 · 10-05 6,205.
This is the top 20. Browse all indexed hotels — search by name, chain or destination.
How the 6 AI assistants compare
Same prompts, same week — different answers. Each model's top hotel, brand mix, and source preferences side by side.
| Assistant | Top hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | — | 10 | deep dive → |
| Gemini | Novotel Miami Brickell | Miami | Accor | 6 | deep dive → |
| Perplexity(paused) | — | — | — | 0 | deep dive → |
| Grok(discontinued) | — | — | — | 0 | deep dive → |
| Copilot | Hilton Beijing Wangfujing | Dongcheng | Hilton | 7 | deep dive → |
| Google AI Mode | Cairo Marriott Hotel | Zamalek | Marriott | 6 | deep dive → |
| Chain | ChatGPT | Gemini | Perplexity(paused) | Grok(discontinued) | Copilot | Google AI Mode | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marriott | 27.9% | 25.7% | — | — | 24.5% | 28.9% | 26.5% |
| Accor | 15.1% | 14.6% | — | — | 15.9% | 9.6% | 14.3% |
| Hilton | 11.1% | 13.4% | — | — | 12.1% | 18.6% | 13.3% |
| Four Seasons | 9.3% | 8.0% | — | — | 10.7% | 7.9% | 9.4% |
| IHG | 8.3% | 9.7% | — | — | 9.8% | 9.3% | 9.3% |
| Hyatt | 10.6% | 8.3% | — | — | 8.4% | 9.1% | 9.1% |
| Mandarin Oriental | 6.6% | 4.0% | — | — | 4.7% | 5.1% | 5.2% |
| Minor | 2.2% | 3.7% | — | — | 3.7% | 2.1% | 3.0% |
| Peninsula | 3.2% | 1.4% | — | — | 2.8% | 2.3% | 2.6% |
| Radisson | 1.9% | 5.1% | — | — | 2.7% | 1.4% | 2.6% |
| Shangri-La | 2.1% | 3.4% | — | — | 2.4% | 2.8% | 2.5% |
| Langham | 1.8% | 2.6% | — | — | 2.4% | 2.8% | 2.3% |
| Category | Top domains | Share | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search engine | — | 59.5% | 11,348 |
| Independent | tripexpert.com(11) · helloprague.net(8) · properhotel.com(8) | 11.4% | 2,174 |
| Chain | marriott.com(64) · all.accor.com(38) · hyatt.com(22) | 8.2% | 1,570 |
| Other | myconciergehotel.com(51) · biirdee.com(36) · bedandmarket.com(20) | 7.7% | 1,463 |
| Editorial | cntraveler.com(173) · timeout.com(171) · thehotelguru.com(158) | 3.9% | 738 |
| Review | tripadvisor.com(471) · tripadvisor.com.au(17) · tripadvisor.in(15) | 3.1% | 592 |
| OTA | booking.com(494) · expedia.com(43) · trip.com(22) | 2.7% | 523 |
| Community | hotelierschoice.com(308) · therooftopguide.com(35) · hostelworld.com(18) | 1.7% | 318 |
| DMO | neworleans.com(26) · sftravel.com(18) · esmadrid.com(16) | 0.7% | 135 |
| Directory | hotelsforkings.com(58) · luxuryhotelcompare.com(26) · hotelsdubaiuae.com(6) | 0.5% | 86 |
| Meta-search | momondo.com(48) · kayak.com(44) · hotelscombined.com(38) | 0.4% | 79 |
| Social | — | 0.2% | 36 |
| AI Tool | staygenie.app(36) | 0.1% | 19 |
google.com/searchviewer and exposes no publisher URL, so it would contribute one domain at ~100% of its volume. Why. Toggle above switches the share computation.| Assistant | Mix (all categories) | Citations |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Other 22%Editorial 21%Review 15%OTA 13%Community 8%Chain 5%DMO 5%Independent 4%Meta-search 3%Directory 2%AI Tool 1%Search engine 0%Social 0% Inside Other (22%): nairobibreaks.com(2) · myconciergehotel.com(30) · uaeways.com(3) · allaboutbuenosaires.com(1) · viennatourism.org(4) · forbes.com.au(3) · planrio.com(10) · torontotourism.org(5) · lovezermatt.com(7) · biirdee.com(4) · myconciergehotel.com(4) · berlintourism.org(6) · sapphiresandstravel.com(2) · cairotourism.org(8) · myconciergehotel.com(4) · elle.com(3) · londontravelgeek.co.uk(2) · athenstourism.org(6) · biirdee.com(1) · balihotels.com(3) · dublintourism.org(9) · delhigpt.in(3) · florencetourism.org(4) · tokyotourism.org(3) · biirdee.com(2) · myconciergehotel.com(2) · omaldives.com(3) · cancuntripinsider.com(3) · amsterdamtourism.org(2) · aucklandtourism.org(4) · lisbonlisticles.com(2) · myconciergehotel.com(3) · singaporewithme.com(3) · bangkokup.com(2) · ask-locals.com(1) · lasvegascompass.com(6) · hanoitourism.org(7) · actuarialsociety.org.za(1) · budgetdecoded.com(1) · roomfornight.com(3) · thegildedescape.com(3) · moneyweek.com(2) · mumbaibusinesstravel.com(2) · lucalvry.com(3) · bedandmarket.com(1) · shanghaitourism.org(4) · amsterdamcitybreaks.com(1) · biirdee.com(1) · biirdee.com(20) · hotelscombined.co.nz(3) · roomfornight.com(4) · alpsbydesign.com(2) · lisbontourism.org(2) · cana.tours(1) · roomfornight.com(3) · qatartourism.com(2) · about-berlin-hotels.de(1) · check-in-kyoto.com(2) · aluri.app(1) · myconciergehotel.com(2) · hotelscombined.ca(2) · biirdee.com(2) · myconciergehotel.com(2) · ola-bookings.com(2) · dolcevitahospitality.com(1) · santorinitourism.org(4) · myconciergehotel.com(1) · bedandmarket.com(4) · paristourism.org(2) · awayedition.com(1) · biirdee.com(1) · thisis-egypt.com(4) · marvelouscity.rio(3) · bedandmarket.com(1) · theirelandedit.com(1) · marrakechauthority.com(1) · outandaboutsa.co.za(1) · businessevents.australia.com(1) · barcelonaforamericans.com(1) · first-class.com(1) · aluri.app(1) · ceibadelmar.com(1) · blog.palosantohotel.com(1) · cnaluxury.channelnewsasia.com(1) · accessiapass.com(1) · zoma.travel(2) · berlin.de(1) · bedandmarket.com(12) · voyagehacks.com(2) · myconciergehotel.com(3) · littletabi.com(2) · biirdee.com(2) · lucalvry.com(1) · creatrip.com(1) · wherebest.com(2) · marrakechgetaways.com(1) · maldivesexclusive.com(2) · worldtravelawards.com(4) · worldtravelawards.com(3) · businessinamsterdam.com(1) · meetings.myswitzerland.com(2) · newswire.co.nz(3) · lisbonwanderlust.com(2) · bedandmarket.com(1) · bishahotelto.com(1) · bedandmarket.com(1) · familytravelasia.com(2) · biirdee.com(3) · hertripguide.com(1) · miamitourism.org(4) · travel-hacker.com(1) · daytripsvietnam.com(1) · thew1london.com(1) | 2,435 |
| Gemini | OTA 31%Editorial 20%Community 17%Other 14%Independent 10%Directory 5%Meta-search 4% | 81 |
| Perplexity(paused) | no citations captured | 0 |
| Grok(discontinued) | no citations captured | 0 |
| Copilot | Independent 40%Chain 29%Other 18%Review 4%Editorial 3%OTA 3%Community 2%Directory 1%Social 0%DMO 0%Meta-search 0%Search engine 0%AI Tool 0% | 4,828 |
| Google AI Mode | Search engine 97%Independent 1%Editorial 0%Chain 0%OTA 0%Review 0%Other 0%Social 0%Community 0%DMO 0%Directory 0%Meta-search 0% | 11,737 |
How AI hotel recommendations evolve
26 weeks of history. Lines aggregate across all 6 AI assistants.
Share of citations by source type, week by week, blended across all 6 assistants. Search engine is its own bucket rather than part of metasearch, and covers Google (every regional domain), Bing and the rest. Google AI Mode routes its cited sources through google.com/searchviewer instead of linking the publisher, and those citations were landing under “meta-search” alongside trivago and kayak — which made the mix read as competitive pressure from metasearch when actual metasearch is under 1%. The dashed rule marks the week that started.
Which categories get a line is decided once over the whole window by total citations, not week by week — otherwise a category dropping out of the top N would look like it collapsed to zero. Everything below the cut is summed into “smaller categories” rather than dropped, so the lines always account for the full week. Citations per week: 04-13 52,088 · 04-20 29,686 · 04-27 60,221 · 05-04 113,706 · 05-11 75,535 · 05-18 77,564 · 05-25 44,779 · 06-01 55,707 · 06-08 52,020 · 06-15 40,740 · 06-22 38,400 · 06-29 44,794 · 07-06 46,722 · 07-13 55,313 · 07-20 49,086 · 07-27 52,248 · 08-03 52,655 · 08-10 46,808 · 08-17 44,949 · 08-24 42,816 · 08-31 44,979 · 09-07 19,677 · 09-14 20,974 · 09-21 20,700 · 09-28 20,551 · 10-05 19,081.
Need a specific week's snapshot? Pick one from the weekly archive.
What's tracked + what's coming
The dashboard launches with ChatGPT. Five more models follow on the same cadence, plus deeper analysis on top.
- ✓ChatGPT — live now, 2,300+ captures every Monday across 56 destinations and 37 countries.
- ✓616 hotel-search prompts per platform per week — 11 question patterns × 56 cities (luxury, family, romantic, design, neighborhood, landmark, …).
- ✓Source mix — every URL ChatGPT cites is bucketed into OTA, editorial, chain site, direct hotel page, review, social, meta-search, AI tool, community, government, or directory.
- ✓Brand share — top hotel chains by mentions, week-over-week deltas.
- ✓Map widget — chain vs independent split, and where the map data comes from (Google Places, Yelp, TripAdvisor, …).
- ✓Sponsored placements — paid ad slots tracked separately from organic recommendations.
- Five more AI assistants
Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, and Google AI Mode are already being scraped on the same weekly cadence. Their dashboards unlock as we validate the data — same depth as the ChatGPT view, plus side-by-side comparisons.
- AI Consistency Score
How stable is a hotel's ranking across the week, across queries, and across models? A single number per property that brand teams can track over time.
- Hotel of the Week + Hallucination of the Week
Recurring stories from the data: the property AI is currently obsessed with, and the funniest mistake it made (e.g. a hotel returned for the wrong city).
- Per-destination drilldown
Click any city to see exactly which hotels each AI recommends, which sources it cites, and how those choices have shifted week over week.
- Multi-week trend lines
Charts on every metric so you can see whether OTAs are gaining ground, which chains are climbing, and where ad density is heading.
How this dashboard is built
Full transparency on data collection.
What "mention" means
Hotel mention = a real-world hotel property that the AI named in its answer, after we matched the name against Google Places. A hotel mentioned multiple times in the same answer counts once.
Parent group mention = a hotel mention rolled up to its parent group via the chain taxonomy. A stay at the Ritz-Carlton counts toward Marriott; a stay at Sofitel counts toward Accor.
Citation / source = a URL the AI fetched from the web during the answer. Tracked separately from mentions. The Source mix charts answer "where does the AI get its information," not "which hotels does it recommend."
Link = the URL the AI gave specifically for a recommended hotel (its booking link). Classified as direct (hotel-owned), OTA (Booking, Expedia, …), chain page (Marriott.com, Hilton.com, …), or other.
Prompts. 616 hotel-search prompts, 56 destinations × 11 templates (e.g. "best hotels in Paris", "family friendly hotels in Cancún", "hotels near Big Ben").
Web search is NOT forced. We measure organic behavior. The web-search rate displayed here is derived from the underlying response stream's search markers, not the unreliable top-level flag.
Hotel matching. Each named hotel mention is matched against Google Places to resolve it to a real property (with address, website, and chain when applicable). The "Direct" source bucket is computed at request time against the same data.
Country. US proxy. As of May 2026, OpenAI's paid sponsor placements are rolling out in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — the test pool may expand. Geo coverage on this dashboard expanding to match.
Data is directional. Some prompts retry due to upstream variance; absolute counts can shift ±5% week to week. Trends are honest; single-week spot reads should be taken with that grain of salt.
Headline mover thresholds. Biggest Riser and Hotel That Disappeared require a prior-week base of ≥10 mentions; Newcomer requires ≥15 current-week mentions. Below these bases, % swings are noise (a 3 → 11 jump looks like "+267%" but carries no signal). Hotel of the Week is exempt — it's the absolute top, not a delta. Absolute counts are shown first, percentages second.
Refresh. Cron runs every Monday at 02:00 UTC. Page revalidates hourly.
Want a deeper read? See the in-depth annual report