Eyeing an opportunity to grow direct
bookings, hotels are pushing their technology partners to integrate live
availability and pricing data into artificial intelligence (AI)-search
platforms.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others have
become popular tools for vacation research, but to date, results have been
limited to hotel descriptions and links.
But following OpenAI’s launch of “ChatGPT apps,” experts are
predicting AI search platforms will soon be able to display real-time
availability and rates. Once live, a dramatic shift in booking behaviors and
patterns is expected, representing a real gamechanger for the
accommodation sector.
The
new ‘front door’ for travel
Startup DirectBooker is one such company poised to take
advantage, and PhocusWire can reveal it is already working with property
management system Eviivo
and booking engine Mirai, as well as another as yet unnamed
“large group,” according to Sanjay Vakil, DirectBooker's CEO and co-founder.
DirectBooker, which also counts former
Tripadvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer and ex-Google Travel boss Richard Holden as
backers and board members, looks to bypass online travel agencies (OTAs) and feed live hotel data
to AI search platforms. The net result is a button or link that goes directly
to the hotel’s booking engine.
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“There's a strong belief this chat
interface for travel is superior to the experience on search, and that as users
get to interact with it a few times, they will prefer it,” Vakil said. “It’s
the new front door in travel.”
DirectBooker isn’t the only one looking
ahead to massive consumer appetite. Other software providers, including The
Hotels Network and Apaleo, are also developing integrations.
Search
fatigue
As well as the more conversational way to
search, another driver is that the large language models will reduce the time
spent researching a vacation.
Gwenael Merlin, EVP of strategic solutions
and partnerships at Eviivo, cites Expedia’s Path to Purchase reports, which
found travelers view an average of 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days prior to
booking a trip.
“I mean, it's phenomenal,” he said.
“ChatGPT, or AI, rather, as a whole, will potentially reverse that trend, specifically
by improving the quality of the search, bringing up what people are really
searching much faster or [providing] more tailored and customized responses.”
Vakil, a former product manager at Google
who specialized in travel, agreed: “The internal data that I reviewed at Google
was comparable. People view a lot of websites before making these purchases. If
you keep opening up new tabs, you end up having multiple ways to purchase that
hotel. There's ads or affiliate links on each of those pages.”
Supplier
demand
The accommodation sector is clearly going
to be supportive of any new pathway to direct bookings, not least to avoid
paying the OTAs commission of anywhere up to 20% of the booking value.
One hotelier in the U.K.’s Lake District
region said he was thinking ahead to when ChatGPT will allow people to book
because of a recent spike in visitor traffic.
“We have seen ChatGPT come up as one of the
referrals for the first time in our weekly reports,” said Thomas Ferrante,
general manager of Gilpin
Hotel & Lake House, at the recent Independent
Hotel Show in London. “A month ago, they weren't in the top 15.”

We are increasingly being asked: ‘How do we make sure our homes show up when someone books through AI?’
David Angotti, Casago
He added that the hotel’s technology
provider, Hart,
was looking into integrations. “Currently, the [AI] links aren't brilliant to
booking engines, so they can't get into availability yet. Once they can, it's
going to be massive,” Ferrante said. “We spent a long time fighting
Booking.com, so we really need to get links into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini
and so on, not to go that way again.”
In the short-term rental sector, Casago
said it was already seeing demand from its franchise partners.
“We are increasingly being asked: ‘How do
we make sure our homes show up when someone books through AI?’” said chief
digital officer David Angotti. “We’ve already started exploring how our data
and pricing infrastructure can connect directly with generative platforms like
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.”
He said Casago was working with its channel
partners and internal technology teams to ensure that when these AI booking
experiences go mainstream, its inventory is both visible and bookable in real
time.
Picking
up speed
With the promise of access to 800 million
users, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app showcase has created a buzz in the industry, and
Juanjo Rodriguez, founder of The Hotels Network, likens its October 6 launch to Apple’s
iPhone App Store launch in 2008.
“This is the same thing, it's opening the
ecosystem,” he said. “It's a new space with a huge audience that grows really
quickly. It's going to be a new discovery space for everything in the world,
including hotels.”
The Hotels Network is looking to capitalize
on the momentum through parent company Lighthouse and a new
product called Connect AI, designed to bridge the gap between
hotels and AI-powered search platforms.
Apaleo, meanwhile, told PhocusWire it was
building a market-facing agent that lets hoteliers create their own ChatGPT
app, which is connected directly to their Apaleo setup.
“This allows them to feed live property
information, availability and rates into the app so guests can complete
bookings directly within ChatGPT. In other words, Apaleo makes a hotel’s
inventory and booking process actionable in ChatGPT,” said CTO Stephan Wiesener.
Update,
review, refresh
With reports of a looming AI bubble, some industry observers
encourage hoteliers to proceed with caution.
“AI is a big thing, but there's a lot of
buzz behind that word as well,” said Liutauras Vaitkevicius, a technology
consultant and former managing director at The Zetter.

There are still so many hotels out there that use outdated technologies that don't update properly. Update, review, refresh, make sure you're relevant, make sure your information is up to date.
Liutauras Vaitkevicius
“A lot of people talk about how you need to
be detectable, not just to Google, not just to SEO but to AI. Now, AI has been
trained on all those data sets anyway, so whether it's Google, or some other
data set, it's still the source; the original source is still the internet,” he
said.
As a result, he said hotels need to ensure
they are constantly visible. “There are still so many hotels out there that use
outdated technologies that don't update properly. Update, review, refresh, make
sure you're relevant, make sure your information is up to date.”
For now, the travel industry is preparing
for the moment when OpenAI opens its ecosystem beyond Expedia and Booking.com
apps inside ChatGPT.
“It is very early days,” said
DirectBooker's Vakil. “The number of people getting approved is, quite frankly,
zero. And we are basically lining up, when that number grows above zero—we'll
be one of those.”
The Phocuswright Conference 2025
Join us at The Phocuswright Conference in San Diego, November 18-20, where DirectBooker CEO and co-founder Sanjay Vakil, ex-Google Travel boss Richard Holden and Tripadvisor founder and former CEO Steve Kaufer will join us for an executive interview on reinventing hotel booking with AI.