AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels: 616 prompts across 56 destinations, a monthly edition checked before it is published.
+ 44 more
The 616 prompts we ask Gemini each edition
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 edition.
- 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 — Gemini
Hotels Gemini talked about most in this edition, with movement against the previous edition. Filtered to Gemini only — switch tabs to compare across models.
Most-mentioned hotel by Gemini in this edition.
| # | Hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | vs prev. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cairo Marriott Hotel | Zamalek | Marriott | 10 | ↑ 6 |
| 6 | The Langham, Melbourne | Southbank | Langham | 6 | ↑ 4 |
| 5 | Shangri-La Sydney | The Rocks | Shangri-La | 6 | ↑ 2 |
| 7 | The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai | Mumbai | Taj | 6 | ↑ 1 |
| 3 | Fairmont Royal York | Toronto | Accor | 6 | ↓ 1 |
| 2 | Cordis, Auckland | Auckland | — | 6 | ↑ 3 |
| 4 | Hotel Monteleone | New Orleans | — | 6 | ↓ 1 |
| 13 | Memmo Alfama Hotel Lisboa | Lisbon | — | 5 | ↑ 1 |
| 12 | Las Alcobas, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Mexico City | Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico City | Marriott | 5 | ↑ 2 |
| 11 | Hotel Schani | Vienna | — | 5 | ↑ 3 |
| 20 | The Venetian Las Vegas | Las Vegas | Las Vegas Sands | 5 | — |
| 9 | Four Seasons Hotel New Orleans | New Orleans | Four Seasons | 5 | ↑ 3 |
| 8 | Eichardt's Private Hotel | Queenstown | — | 5 | — |
| 10 | Four Seasons Hotel Sydney | The Rocks | Four Seasons | 5 | ↑ 1 |
| 19 | The Silo Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | — | 5 | ↑ 2 |
| 18 | The Nile Ritz-Carlton, Cairo | El Nil | Marriott | 5 | ↑ 4 |
| 17 | Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | Ha Noi | Accor | 5 | ↑ 2 |
| 16 | QT Gold Coast | Surfers Paradise | — | 5 | — |
| 15 | Nairobi Serena Hotel | Nairobi | — | 5 | ↑ 3 |
| 14 | Mont Cervin Palace | Zermatt | — | 5 | — |
When Gemini hands out a hotel link, where does it go?
Every URL the AI returned for a named hotel, classified into direct, OTA, chain page, Google Travel or other.
Hidden from the week of October 19, 2026. The Gemini data I capture no longer includes the answer as a user sees it, only the links the model writes into its raw reply. Those cannot be compared with earlier weeks, so they are not shown. Hotel mentions are unaffected.
Week by week. Google Travel is a link to the hotel’s page on Google’s own hotel search (google.com/travel): Google keeping the booking click rather than sending it to the hotel. It is its own line, not folded into direct. From 7 September 2026 Gemini links nearly every hotel this way. Other Google is the rest of google.com (search results, maps), split out of what used to be counted as “other” for the same reason: the assistant keeping the click 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.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026
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: 04-27 1,622 · 05-04 5,065 · 05-11 2,661 · 05-18 2,040 · 05-25 2,055 · 06-01 1,927 · 06-08 2,001 · 06-15 2,030 · 06-22 1,763 · 06-29 1,845 · 07-06 2,028 · 07-13 1,749 · 07-20 2,134 · 07-27 1,986 · 08-03 1,969 · 08-10 1,963 · 08-17 1,983 · 08-24 1,913 · 08-31 1,912 · 09-07 2,134 · 09-14 1,806 · 09-21 2,075 · 09-28 2,143 · 10-05 1,176 · 10-12 2,170.
Where Gemini pulls hotel information from
Every URL Gemini retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
OTA & Aggregator expedia.com 53% · hotels.com 32% · booking.com 15% | 27.3% | 761 |
Other luxuryhotel.world 50% · biirdee.com 26% · bestcancunhotels.com 24% | 21.1% | 587 |
Editorial forbestravelguide.com 43% · thehotelguru.com 41% · luxurylink.com 17% | 14.6% | 406 |
Community theboujist.com 59% · santorinidave.com 25% · therooftopguide.com 15% | 9.9% | 276 |
Independent Hotel meritelhanoi.com 47% · australia.com 27% · hotel.com.au 27% | 9.8% | 274 |
Hotel Directory boutiquehotel.me 70% · themostperfectview.com 21% · designhotels.com 9% | 6.1% | 169 |
Chain marriott.com 65% · all.accor.com 21% · fourseasons.com 14% | 4.3% | 121 |
Government / DMO experiencegoldcoast.com 39% · queenstownnz.co.nz 39% · esmadrid.com 23% | 2.2% | 60 |
Meta-search trivago.com 47% · kayak.com 45% · ar.trivago.com 8% | 2.2% | 60 |
AI Tool staygenie.app 100% | 1.8% | 51 |
Review Site oyster.com 100% | 0.4% | 12 |
Social Channel reddit.com 86% · youtube.com 14% | 0.3% | 7 |
Share of citations by source type, week by week. 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.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026
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: 04-27 486 · 05-04 254 · 05-11 3,961 · 05-18 4,314 · 05-25 4,478 · 06-01 3,350 · 06-08 7,990 · 06-15 877 · 06-22 2,538 · 06-29 3,936 · 07-06 4,014 · 07-13 4,671 · 07-20 4,203 · 07-27 5,282 · 08-03 5,086 · 08-10 4,994 · 08-17 4,086 · 08-24 2,489 · 08-31 3,880 · 11-02 2,784.
Top hotel parent groups by Gemini mentions
Each Gemini mention matched against Google Places, then rolled up to parent group (Marriott = Ritz-Carlton + Westin + Sheraton + EDITION + …, etc.). Change vs the previous edition. Detection via 175+ brand-domain rules.
| 1 | Oberoi | 7 → 14 | +100% |
| 2 | citizenM | 5 → 10 | +100% |
| 3 | Langham | 12 → 15 | +25% |
| 4 | IHG | 52 → 64 | +23% |
| 5 | Accor | 92 → 102 | +11% |
| 1 | Rocco Forte | 12 → 4 | -67% |
| 2 | Belmond | 10 → 6 | -40% |
| 3 | Peninsula | 14 → 9 | -36% |
| 4 | Mandarin Oriental | 28 → 21 | -25% |
| 5 | Rosewood | 13 → 11 | -15% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | vs prev. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 184 | 118 | ↓ 2.1% | |
| 2 | Accor | 102 | 69 | ↑ 10.9% | |
| 3 | IHG | 64 | 49 | ↑ 23.1% | |
| 4 | Hilton | 63 | 42 | ↑ 10.5% | |
| 5 | Hyatt | 59 | 41 | ↓ 11.9% | |
| 6 | Four Seasons | 55 | 25 | ↓ 12.7% | |
| 7 | Shangri-La | 25 | 13 | ↓ 7.4% | |
| 8 | Radisson | 25 | 16 | · 0% | |
| 9 | Mandarin Oriental | 21 | 13 | ↓ 25.0% | |
| 10 | Taj | 18 | 8 | ↑ 5.9% | |
| 11 | Kempinski | 17 | 8 | ↓ 10.5% | |
| 12 | Langham | 15 | 5 | ↑ 25.0% | |
| 13 | Oberoi | 14 | 6 | ↑ 100.0% | |
| 14 | Minor | 14 | 12 | · 0% | |
| 15 | Rosewood | 11 | 8 | ↓ 15.4% | |
| 16 | citizenM | 10 | 8 | ↑ 100.0% | |
| 17 | Peninsula | 9 | 6 | ↓ 35.7% | |
| 18 | Wyndham | 8 | 6 | · 0% | |
| 19 | 1 Hotels | 7 | 5 | ↓ 22.2% | |
| 20 | Capella | 6 | 4 | ↓ 33.3% |
Of the hotels named in this edition: 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 for this edition. 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.
- 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.
Does Gemini send people to Reddit and YouTube?
Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video, week by week. Worldwide.
Share of answers citing at least one Reddit thread or YouTube video. Counted from the citation domains, so this measures what Gemini showed as a source — not whether it read them.
Weekly until 19 Oct 2026, monthly from November 2026
Latest week (2026-11-02): 4 of 1,232 answers cited Reddit (0.3%), 1 cited YouTube, across 2,784 citations.