AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
The 616 prompts we ask ChatGPT 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 — ChatGPT
Hotels ChatGPT talked about most this week, with week-over-week movement. Filtered to ChatGPT only — switch tabs to compare across models.
Most-mentioned hotel by ChatGPT this week.
Wasn't on ChatGPT's radar last week. Now it is.
| # | Hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | W/W |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hotel Indigo Shanghai on The Bund | Shanghai | IHG | 10 | ↑ 10 |
| 2 | Electra Palace Athens | Athens | — | 9 | ↑ 9 |
| 6 | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | — | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 5 | Sofitel Auckland Viaduct Harbour | Auckland | Accor | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 8 | Wynn Las Vegas | Las Vegas | — | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 4 | Pulitzer Amsterdam | Amsterdam | — | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 7 | The Silo Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | — | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 3 | Fairmont Rio de Janeiro Copacabana | Rio de Janeiro | Accor | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 15 | The Langham Gold Coast | Surfers Paradise | Langham | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 14 | Sankara Nairobi, Autograph Collection | Nairobi | Marriott | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 9 | Capella Sydney | Sydney | Capella | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 12 | Palacio Duhau - Park Hyatt Buenos Aires | Buenos Aires | Hyatt | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 11 | Le Sirenuse | Positano | — | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 10 | Four Seasons Hotel Seoul | Jongno District | Four Seasons | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 13 | Park Hyatt Auckland | Auckland | Hyatt | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 23 | Grand Hotel Zermatterhof | Zermatt | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 30 | Peridot Grand Luxury Boutique Hotel | Ha Noi | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 38 | The Dylan | Amsterdam | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 27 | Mandarin Oriental, Doha | Doha | Mandarin Oriental | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 46 | The St. Regis | Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City | Marriott | 6 | ↑ 6 |
When ChatGPT hands out a hotel link, where does it go?
Every URL the AI returned for a named hotel, classified into direct (the hotel's own site), OTA (Booking / Expedia / …), chain page (marriott.com / hilton.com / …), or other. Chain folds into direct in the headline number because chain pages are still brand-controlled.
Sponsored placements
OpenAI is rolling out paid sponsor placements in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — testing may expand. We detect real single-advertiser ad units (organic shopping cards excluded) and pull the brand.
| # | Advertiser | Captures |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Booking.com | 156 |
| 2 | Expedia | 35 |
| 3 | Marriott | 14 |
| 4 | Choice Hotels | 14 |
| 5 | EF Go Ahead Tours | 11 |
| 6 | Centara Hotels & Resorts | 11 |
| 7 | IHG Hotels & Resorts | 7 |
| 8 | Hyatt | 6 |
| 9 | TOURISM AUSTRALIA | 4 |
| 10 | Hilton | 3 |
Where ChatGPT pulls hotel information from
Every URL ChatGPT cited classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
Other biirdee.com 35% · luxstay.world 35% · tripexpert.com 31% | 24.4% | 2,288 |
Chain marriott.com 68% · fourseasons.com 16% · hyatt.com 16% | 14.4% | 1,350 |
OTA & Aggregator expedia.com 61% · hotels.com 26% · booking.com 13% | 13.0% | 1,219 |
Editorial luxuryhotel.guru 35% · theluxuryeditor.com 35% · thehotelguru.com 30% | 12.3% | 1,158 |
Community hotelierschoice.com 62% · travelmyth.com 26% · luxuryhotel.guide 12% | 8.9% | 831 |
Review Site tripadvisor.com 63% · oyster.com 34% · tripadvisor.ie 3% | 8.5% | 800 |
Independent Hotel msocial.com 40% · upperhouse.com 31% · sirenuse.it 29% | 7.0% | 657 |
Social Channel reddit.com 99% · youtube.com 1% | 3.9% | 363 |
Top hotel parent groups by ChatGPT mentions
Each ChatGPT mention matched against Google Places, then rolled up to parent group (Marriott = Ritz-Carlton + Westin + Sheraton + EDITION + …, etc.). WoW delta vs last week. Detection via 175+ brand-domain rules.
| 1 | Lungarno | 5 → 10 | +100% |
| 2 | Capella | 11 → 16 | +45% |
| 3 | Rosewood | 20 → 26 | +30% |
| 4 | The Hoxton | 8 → 10 | +25% |
| 5 | Rocco Forte | 9 → 11 | +22% |
| 1 | Leela | 11 → 6 | -45% |
| 2 | Meliá | 13 → 8 | -38% |
| 3 | Langham | 33 → 22 | -33% |
| 4 | 1 Hotels | 12 → 8 | -33% |
| 5 | Oberoi | 22 → 15 | -32% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 306 | 151 | ↓ 8.7% | |
| 2 | Accor | 177 | 102 | ↑ 7.9% | |
| 3 | Hyatt | 128 | 66 | ↓ 11.7% | |
| 4 | Four Seasons | 99 | 34 | ↓ 1.0% | |
| 5 | Hilton | 97 | 63 | ↓ 24.2% | |
| 6 | IHG | 91 | 62 | ↑ 5.8% | |
| 7 | Mandarin Oriental | 53 | 20 | ↓ 1.9% | |
| 8 | Shangri-La | 31 | 13 | ↓ 3.1% | |
| 9 | Radisson | 30 | 21 | ↑ 20.0% | |
| 10 | Taj | 29 | 9 | ↓ 6.5% | |
| 11 | Minor | 29 | 20 | ↓ 12.1% | |
| 12 | Rosewood | 26 | 7 | ↑ 30.0% | |
| 13 | Peninsula | 26 | 12 | ↓ 7.1% | |
| 14 | Kempinski | 26 | 10 | ↓ 10.3% | |
| 15 | Langham | 22 | 7 | ↓ 33.3% | |
| 16 | Capella | 16 | 6 | ↑ 45.5% | |
| 17 | Oberoi | 15 | 6 | ↓ 31.8% | |
| 18 | Belmond | 13 | 4 | · 0% | |
| 19 | Wyndham | 13 | 13 | ↓ 7.1% | |
| 20 | Rocco Forte | 11 | 4 | ↑ 22.2% |
Of the hotels named this week: how many resolved to a chain (Marriott / Accor / …), an independent property, a vacation rental, or stayed unmatched.
What every metric means
Plain-English definitions for each number on this page. For deeper visuals + examples, see the annual landscape report linked at the bottom.
- Captures
- Number of AI responses we collected this week. Target = 616 per platform (one per prompt). Less when there are upstream errors.
- Web search
- Did the response trigger a live web fetch? Detected from the underlying response stream’s search-result events, not the unreliable top-level flag. We do NOT force web search — this is organic model behavior.
- Map widget
- Did the response render a hotel-card map (the Google-Maps-style widget ChatGPT shows for travel queries)? Each card is a "map entity" with its own provider.
- Sponsored placements
- Paid sponsor placements. Detected from real single-advertiser ad units in the response stream. Excludes ChatGPT’s organic shopping cards (which are unpaid product carousels). US/AU/NZ/CA only as of May 2026.
- Sources / response
- Distinct URLs the model consulted while answering — the URLs that show up in its retrieval log, regardless of whether it cited them inline. Computed only over web-search responses (otherwise the answer is from training data, no sources to count).
- Citations / response
- Subset of sources that the model rendered as inline footnote pills in the answer. A source becomes a citation when the model explicitly references it.
- Fanouts / response
- Number of sub-queries the model spun up internally to answer the prompt (e.g. "best hotels Paris" might fan out to "hotels Paris Marais", "luxury hotels Paris", "rooftop hotels Paris", …).
- Map entities / response
- Hotel cards inside the map widget. Each carries a provider (Google Places, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Foursquare, SERP) and a place ID where applicable.
- OTA
- Online travel agency (Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda, Trip.com, Priceline, etc.) — commission-based booking sites.
- Direct
- A hotel’s own website. Computed at request time by matching the cited domain against Google Places.
- Chain
- A hotel chain’s brand website (hilton.com, marriott.com, ihg.com, …). 175+ chain-domain rules.
- Editorial
- Travel media (Condé Nast Traveler, Time Out, Lonely Planet, Forbes Travel Guide, NYT, etc.) and city-specific travel blogs (santorinidave.com, theurbanlist.com, etc.).
- Directory
- Multi-property hotel consortia / brand collectives (Small Luxury Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, Preferred Hotels, Virtuoso, …). Aggregate hotels under one umbrella but aren’t a single OTA.
- Review
- TripAdvisor, Oyster, Yelp, Trustpilot, Holidaycheck — review-first platforms.