AI Hotel Landscape
How leading AI assistants recommend hotels — 616 prompts across 56 destinations, refreshed every Monday.
+ 44 more
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.
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 retrieved classified into 12 buckets: OTAs, editorial, chain sites, direct hotel pages, social, meta-search, AI tools, community, government, directory consortia, and other.
Independent Hotel pestana.com 36% · ad.doubleclick.net 33% · hiusa.org 31% | 26.8% | 2,983 |
OTA & Aggregator booking.com 43% · expedia.com 33% · hotels.com 24% | 22.3% | 2,475 |
Chain marriott.com 47% · hilton.com 31% · ihg.com 22% | 17.2% | 1,916 |
Review Site tripadvisor.com 86% · tripadvisor.co.uk 8% · tripadvisor.com.au 6% | 14.2% | 1,576 |
Other discoverasr.com 41% · hrewards.com 35% · hotelscombined.com.au 24% | 8.3% | 917 |
Editorial thehotelguru.com 38% · timeout.com 32% · cntraveler.com 31% | 4.1% | 452 |
Meta-search kayak.com 56% · skyscanner.net 23% · hotelscombined.com 21% | 3.0% | 332 |
Community solotravelhotels.com 45% · myboutiquehotel.com 34% · hostelworld.com 22% | 2.3% | 258 |
Social Channel youtube.com 52% · facebook.com 32% · reddit.com 16% | 0.8% | 87 |
Hotel Directory boutiquehotel.me 43% · bestzermatthotels.com 30% · couples-hotels.com 26% | 0.4% | 49 |
Government / DMO neworleans.com 53% · visitberlin.de 27% · therocks.com 20% | 0.4% | 40 |
AI Tool staygenie.app 90% · wanderlog.com 7% · layla.ai 3% | 0.3% | 30 |
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 | Radisson | 38 → 59 | +55% |
| 2 | Four Seasons | 36 → 45 | +25% |
| 3 | Kempinski | 13 → 16 | +23% |
| 4 | Marriott | 232 → 280 | +21% |
| 5 | Accor | 68 → 82 | +21% |
| 1 | Millennium | 14 → 5 | -64% |
| 2 | Meliá | 10 → 8 | -20% |
| 3 | Shangri-La | 13 → 11 | -15% |
| 4 | Mandarin Oriental | 33 → 28 | -15% |
| 5 | Taj | 15 → 13 | -13% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 280 | 157 | ↑ 20.7% | |
| 2 | Hilton | 141 | 70 | ↑ 11.0% | |
| 3 | IHG | 105 | 59 | ↑ 19.3% | |
| 4 | Hyatt | 95 | 59 | ↑ 5.6% | |
| 5 | Accor | 82 | 38 | ↑ 20.6% | |
| 6 | Radisson | 59 | 26 | ↑ 55.3% | |
| 7 | Four Seasons | 45 | 24 | ↑ 25.0% | |
| 8 | Minor | 39 | 19 | ↑ 11.4% | |
| 9 | Mandarin Oriental | 28 | 15 | ↓ 15.2% | |
| 10 | Wyndham | 26 | 18 | ↓ 7.1% | |
| 11 | Langham | 23 | 8 | ↑ 9.5% | |
| 12 | Kempinski | 16 | 4 | ↑ 23.1% | |
| 13 | Peninsula | 16 | 7 | ↑ 14.3% | |
| 14 | Taj | 13 | 6 | ↓ 13.3% | |
| 15 | Shangri-La | 11 | 5 | ↓ 15.4% | |
| 16 | Barceló | 9 | 7 | ↑ 28.6% | |
| 17 | Oberoi | 9 | 3 | ↓ 10.0% | |
| 18 | B&B Hotels | 8 | 4 | ↑ 166.7% | |
| 19 | Meliá | 8 | 6 | ↓ 20.0% | |
| 20 | Huazhu | 6 | 3 | ↑ 200.0% |
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.