AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
+ 44 more
The 616 prompts we ask Google AI Mode 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 — Google AI Mode
Hotels Google AI Mode talked about most this week, with week-over-week movement. Filtered to Google AI Mode only — switch tabs to compare across models.
Most-mentioned hotel by Google AI Mode this week.
| # | Hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | W/W |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai | Mumbai | Taj | 8 | ↑ 8 |
| 2 | Four Seasons Hotel Sydney | The Rocks | Four Seasons | 7 | ↑ 7 |
| 3 | Cordis, Auckland | Auckland | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 6 | Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing Beijing | Dongcheng | Mandarin Oriental | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 8 | Palacio Duhau - Park Hyatt Buenos Aires | Buenos Aires | Hyatt | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 16 | The Venetian Las Vegas | Las Vegas | Las Vegas Sands | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 10 | Peridot Grand Luxury Boutique Hotel | Ha Noi | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 5 | Hotel Calimala Florence | Florence | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 11 | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 12 | The Langham Gold Coast | Surfers Paradise | Langham | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 7 | Marina Bay Sands Singapore | 10 Bayfront Ave | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 14 | The Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore | Marina Bay | Marriott | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 4 | Hotel Brunelleschi | Florence | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 9 | Park Hyatt Sydney | The Rocks | Hyatt | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 15 | The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto | Toronto | Marriott | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 13 | The Langham, Melbourne | Southbank | Langham | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 19 | Copacabana Palace, A Belmond Hotel, Rio de Janeiro | Rio de Janeiro | Belmond | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 45 | The Rees Hotel, Luxury Apartments & Lakeside Residences | Queenstown | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 33 | Mont Cervin Palace | Zermatt | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 37 | Santa Caterina Hotel | Amalfi | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
When Google AI Mode 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.
Where Google AI Mode pulls hotel information from
Every URL Google AI Mode retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
Meta-search google.com 99% · kayak.com 0% · trivago.com 0% | 54.4% | 14,343 |
Other foratravel.com 55% · cntravellerme.com 23% · loveholidays.com 22% | 12.9% | 3,410 |
OTA & Aggregator expedia.com 43% · agoda.com 33% · booking.com 24% | 12.2% | 3,211 |
Editorial cntraveler.com 41% · thehotelguru.com 35% · forbestravelguide.com 24% | 6.7% | 1,772 |
Social Channel youtube.com 46% · reddit.com 32% · instagram.com 22% | 3.8% | 1,003 |
Independent Hotel chase.com 35% · hrs.com 35% · scottdunn.com 29% | 3.0% | 789 |
Chain marriott.com 48% · all.accor.com 28% · fourseasons.com 24% | 2.2% | 573 |
Review Site tripadvisor.com 93% · tripadvisor.co.uk 4% · tripadvisor.in 3% | 2.1% | 550 |
Community myboutiquehotel.com 48% · santorinidave.com 29% · travelmyth.co.uk 23% | 1.3% | 347 |
Hotel Directory designhotels.com 45% · hotelsforkings.com 33% · bestboutiquehotelsworldwide.com 22% | 0.6% | 169 |
Government / DMO neworleans.com 36% · queenstownnz.co.nz 33% · capetown.hotelguide.co.za 30% | 0.6% | 152 |
AI Tool staygenie.app 97% · topratedplaces.ai 3% | 0.1% | 33 |
The domains Google AI Mode pulls most — and how many it keeps
Individual domains ranked by URLs retrieved, with the category and the share that survive into the answer (throughput = cited ÷ retrieved). Worldwide, current week.
| Domain | Category | Retrieved | Cited | Throughput |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| google.com | Meta-search | 14,053 | 467 | 3% |
| expedia.com | OTA & Aggregator | 807 | 80 | 10% |
| agoda.com | OTA & Aggregator | 617 | 18 | 3% |
| tripadvisor.com | Review Site | 472 | 231 | 49% |
| booking.com | OTA & Aggregator | 461 | 134 | 29% |
| youtube.com | Social Channel | 371 | 128 | 35% |
| cntraveler.com | Editorial | 270 | 129 | 48% |
| reddit.com | Social Channel | 262 | 154 | 59% |
| thehotelguru.com | Editorial | 226 | 61 | 27% |
| hotels.com | OTA & Aggregator | 185 | 37 | 20% |
| expedia.ca | OTA & Aggregator | 184 | 5 | 3% |
| instagram.com | Social Channel | 178 | 42 | 24% |
| forbestravelguide.com | Editorial | 155 | 72 | 46% |
| facebook.com | Social Channel | 143 | 55 | 38% |
| us.trip.com | OTA & Aggregator | 139 | 11 | 8% |
Top hotel parent groups by Google AI Mode mentions
Each Google AI Mode 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 | Barceló | 6 → 13 | +117% |
| 2 | Hilton | 71 → 96 | +35% |
| 1 | Rocco Forte | 11 → 4 | -64% |
| 2 | citizenM | 10 → 4 | -60% |
| 3 | Peninsula | 26 → 15 | -42% |
| 4 | Shangri-La | 38 → 23 | -39% |
| 5 | Rosewood | 26 → 16 | -38% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 223 | 134 | ↓ 18.0% | |
| 2 | Accor | 105 | 68 | ↓ 29.1% | |
| 3 | Hilton | 96 | 60 | ↑ 35.2% | |
| 4 | Hyatt | 88 | 46 | ↓ 20.0% | |
| 5 | Four Seasons | 82 | 32 | ↓ 29.9% | |
| 6 | IHG | 66 | 47 | ↓ 9.6% | |
| 7 | Mandarin Oriental | 33 | 14 | ↓ 31.3% | |
| 8 | Minor | 27 | 16 | ↑ 3.8% | |
| 9 | Radisson | 26 | 19 | ↓ 10.3% | |
| 10 | Langham | 24 | 9 | ↓ 33.3% | |
| 11 | Shangri-La | 23 | 10 | ↓ 39.5% | |
| 12 | Taj | 22 | 9 | ↑ 4.8% | |
| 13 | Kempinski | 19 | 7 | ↓ 29.6% | |
| 14 | Rosewood | 16 | 8 | ↓ 38.5% | |
| 15 | Peninsula | 15 | 8 | ↓ 42.3% | |
| 16 | Capella | 13 | 6 | ↓ 35.0% | |
| 17 | Barceló | 13 | 7 | ↑ 116.7% | |
| 18 | Belmond | 12 | 3 | · 0% | |
| 19 | Oberoi | 10 | 3 | ↓ 37.5% | |
| 20 | Wyndham | 9 | 8 | · 0% |
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.