AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
The 616 prompts we ask Perplexity 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 — Perplexity
Hotels Perplexity talked about most this week, with week-over-week movement. Filtered to Perplexity only — switch tabs to compare across models.
Most-mentioned hotel by Perplexity this week.
Wasn't on Perplexity's radar last week. Now it is.
| # | Hotel | City | Chain | Mentions | W/W |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Il San Pietro di Positano | Positano | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 1 | Electra Palace Athens | Athens | — | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 3 | Park Hyatt Sydney | The Rocks | Hyatt | 6 | ↑ 6 |
| 11 | The Leela Palace, New Delhi | New Delhi | Leela | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 13 | THE OMNIA | Zermatt | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 9 | The Fullerton Bay Hotel Singapore | 80 Collyer Quay | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 8 | Mont Cervin Palace | Zermatt | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 14 | The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai | Mumbai | Taj | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 10 | The Godfrey Hotel Boston | Boston | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 6 | Hotel Nikko San Francisco | San Francisco | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 12 | The Oberoi, New Delhi | New Delhi | Oberoi | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 7 | Hotel Schani | Vienna | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 4 | Alvear Palace Hotel | Buenos Aires | — | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 15 | The Westbury | Dublin 2 | Doyle Collection | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 5 | Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin | Berlin | Kempinski | 5 | ↑ 5 |
| 32 | The Imperial New Delhi | New Delhi | — | 4 | ↑ 4 |
| 17 | Cape Grace - A Fairmont Managed Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | Accor | 4 | ↑ 4 |
| 39 | The Silo Hotel | Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, Cape Town | — | 4 | ↑ 4 |
| 26 | Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport | Boston | — | 4 | ↑ 4 |
| 18 | Crown Towers Melbourne | Southbank | — | 4 | ↑ 4 |
When Perplexity 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 Perplexity pulls hotel information from
Every URL Perplexity cited classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
OTA & Aggregator booking.com 48% · hotels.com 38% · us.trip.com 13% | 37.9% | 2,334 |
Review Site tripadvisor.com 48% · tripadvisor.in 27% · tripadvisor.co.uk 24% | 24.1% | 1,486 |
Other tripadvisor.com.my 43% · hotelscombined.com.au 32% · skyscanner.com.sg 24% | 12.9% | 796 |
Community travelmyth.com 43% · myboutiquehotel.com 30% · hostelworld.com 27% | 6.6% | 404 |
Meta-search hotelscombined.com 41% · kayak.com 38% · skyscanner.net 22% | 6.2% | 383 |
Editorial fivestaralliance.com 47% · timeout.com 32% · thehotelguru.com 20% | 6.0% | 371 |
Chain all.accor.com 65% · choicehotels.com 18% · radissonhotels.com 18% | 1.9% | 114 |
Social Channel facebook.com 50% · youtube.com 35% · reddit.com 15% | 1.0% | 64 |
Top hotel parent groups by Perplexity mentions
Each Perplexity 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 | Taj | 6 → 14 | +133% |
| 2 | Leela | 5 → 10 | +100% |
| 3 | Shangri-La | 12 → 16 | +33% |
| 1 | Wyndham | 14 → 7 | -50% |
| 2 | Hilton | 73 → 38 | -48% |
| 3 | Radisson | 25 → 14 | -44% |
| 4 | IHG | 65 → 42 | -35% |
| 5 | Minor | 16 → 11 | -31% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 155 | 101 | ↓ 7.7% | |
| 2 | Accor | 70 | 48 | ↓ 14.6% | |
| 3 | Hyatt | 70 | 45 | ↑ 1.4% | |
| 4 | IHG | 42 | 35 | ↓ 35.4% | |
| 5 | Four Seasons | 39 | 25 | ↓ 18.8% | |
| 6 | Hilton | 38 | 32 | ↓ 47.9% | |
| 7 | Langham | 18 | 9 | · 0% | |
| 8 | Shangri-La | 16 | 9 | ↑ 33.3% | |
| 9 | Mandarin Oriental | 16 | 10 | ↓ 23.8% | |
| 10 | Kempinski | 14 | 6 | · 0% | |
| 11 | Radisson | 14 | 9 | ↓ 44.0% | |
| 12 | Taj | 14 | 7 | ↑ 133.3% | |
| 13 | Peninsula | 12 | 6 | · 0% | |
| 14 | Minor | 11 | 11 | ↓ 31.3% | |
| 15 | Leela | 10 | 3 | ↑ 100.0% | |
| 16 | Belmond | 8 | 3 | ↑ 60.0% | |
| 17 | Wyndham | 7 | 6 | ↓ 50.0% | |
| 18 | Doyle Collection | 6 | 2 | ↑ 200.0% | |
| 19 | Oberoi | 6 | 2 | ↓ 14.3% | |
| 20 | Las Vegas Sands | 5 | 2 | · 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.