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 in Gold Coast — Perplexity
Perplexity's top picks specifically in Gold Coast, AU. Pick a different destination above, or clear to see worldwide.
Most-mentioned hotel by Perplexity this week.
Wasn't on Perplexity's radar last week. Now it is.
When Perplexity hands out a hotel link, where does it go?Worldwide
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.
Review Site tripadvisor.com 60% · tripadvisor.in 20% · tripadvisor.co.uk 20% | 26.2% | 110 |
OTA & Aggregator booking.com 51% · hotels.com 31% · expedia.com 18% | 19.3% | 81 |
Other tripadvisor.com.my 44% · discoverasr.com 30% · hrewards.com 26% | 14.0% | 59 |
Independent Hotel harbourgrand.com 38% · caesars.com 31% · pestana.com 31% | 13.3% | 56 |
Chain marriott.com 43% · hilton.com 34% · ihg.com 22% | 7.9% | 33 |
Editorial timeout.com 40% · thehotelguru.com 35% · trip101.com 25% | 7.4% | 31 |
Community hostelworld.com 41% · myboutiquehotel.com 31% · solotravelhotels.com 28% | 6.0% | 25 |
Meta-search kayak.com 48% · hotelscombined.com 34% · skyscanner.net 18% | 4.0% | 17 |
Top hotel parent groups by Perplexity mentionsWorldwide
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 | 13 → 33 | +154% |
| 2 | Wyndham | 6 → 15 | +150% |
| 3 | Minor | 13 → 27 | +108% |
| 4 | Hilton | 49 → 98 | +100% |
| 5 | Oberoi | 8 → 12 | +50% |
| 1 | Langham | 25 → 15 | -40% |
| 2 | Kempinski | 16 → 10 | -38% |
| 3 | Meliá | 15 → 10 | -33% |
| 4 | Shangri-La | 22 → 16 | -27% |
| 5 | Taj | 15 → 11 | -27% |
| # | Brand | Mentions | Hotels | W/W | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marriott | 216 | 146 | ↑ 28.6% | |
| 2 | Hilton | 98 | 64 | ↑ 100.0% | |
| 3 | Hyatt | 84 | 51 | ↑ 33.3% | |
| 4 | IHG | 76 | 54 | ↑ 35.7% | |
| 5 | Accor | 75 | 48 | ↓ 26.5% | |
| 6 | Four Seasons | 51 | 29 | ↑ 24.4% | |
| 7 | Radisson | 33 | 23 | ↑ 153.8% | |
| 8 | Minor | 27 | 20 | ↑ 107.7% | |
| 9 | Mandarin Oriental | 22 | 13 | ↑ 10.0% | |
| 10 | Shangri-La | 16 | 12 | ↓ 27.3% | |
| 11 | Wyndham | 15 | 12 | ↑ 150.0% | |
| 12 | Langham | 15 | 7 | ↓ 40.0% | |
| 13 | Peninsula | 14 | 8 | ↓ 12.5% | |
| 14 | Oberoi | 12 | 5 | ↑ 50.0% | |
| 15 | Taj | 11 | 7 | ↓ 26.7% | |
| 16 | Kempinski | 10 | 7 | ↓ 37.5% | |
| 17 | Meliá | 10 | 7 | ↓ 33.3% | |
| 18 | Design Hotels | 9 | 5 | — | |
| 19 | Doyle Collection | 8 | 3 | ↑ 60.0% | |
| 20 | Belmond | 8 | 4 | · 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.