IHG has partnered with Google on artificial intelligence (AI)-powered trip planning capabilities.
Reporting fourth quarter and full-year 2025 earnings, the hotel company said is grouping AI into three areas—guest acquisition, commercial optimization and cost efficiency.
The company said the trip planning capabilities are a "key step in moving towards a more conversational search experience" on its own websites and apps.
Search, discover, book and stay falls within guest acquisition, and in addition to the trip planning initiative, the company plans to introduce a new content platform this year "ensuring the right hotel information is showing up on the right channels at the right time."
The AI-compatible content platform will provide video, 360-degree images, floor plans, virtual tours and automated language translation.
"It will transform how we structure hotel content and strengthen the digital hooks needed for our hotels to be recommended by AI agents. It will also create new ways to combine and display information, unlocking greater flexibility in how content is created, delivered and personalized," said Elie Maalouf, CEO of IHG.
The company said it is also testing AI-powered marketing tools that are boosting click-through rates and ROI so far.
The group's loyalty platforms are also getting a refresh, and there are plans to deploy an AI-enhanced customer relationship management platform this year to drive greater personalization.
"Together, these capabilities will strengthen our direct channels, bring more guests to our hotels and keep our most loyal guests coming back," said Maalouf.
He also touched on commercial optimization saying the company's new revenue management system is fully rolled out. Regarding cost efficiency, he said IHG is giving the latest technology to employees to "establish new ways of working, automating routine tasks and delivering insights across the business faster."
Last week, Hyatt Hotels said during its earnings call that it had been working on "AI enablement" for two years and identified use cases with four already "executed as large-scale agentic platforms."
The company is also working with OpenAI on search and has launched an app in ChatGPT.
"Everybody in the world is at the table with Google and everything else," said Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt.
"You can assume that all suppliers are engaged with all providers of LLM-based platforms. I personally think that the natural language search capability is going to grow in popularity, and we now have longitudinal data over a couple of quarters which clearly demonstrate that the booking conversion rate and the total revenue being generated through the native intent-based search capabilities that we built into hyatt.com are having a positive impact. We are seeing higher conversions, higher revenues per booking, longer length of stay and so we are seeing the actual evolution of search—the way search is being done—translate into value."
He added that the company has also licensed Microsoft and Anthropic "for use in different agentic platforms that we have already built and that are in production at the moment. They are live."
Hoplamazian went on to say that the company is prepared for agent-to-agent bookings whereby its own agents would work autonomously on reservations with agents from travel managers, meetings planners or individual travelers.