Market intelligence platform Lighthouse has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) engine, Connect AI, to bridge the gap between hotels and AI-powered search and travel planning platforms.
“It’s pretty clear that the chat interfaces—ChatGPT, Claude, etc.—are a new way for people to access content services, and now in the travel space, the hotel brands are not even there,” said Juanjo Rodriguez, founder of The Hotels Network, which was acquired by Lighthouse in April.
“There’s more and more people using them to find and plan travel, and hotel brands don’t even come up in the first results—it’s either journey content, maybe OTAs, and basically, hoteliers are missing on this new channel. We are like in the very first stages of when Google launched a search engine.”
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With Connect AI, Lighthouse is hoping to help users discover hotel brands while also leveraging the Model Context Protocol to help large language models (LLMs) and AI agents access and understand hotels’ real-time rates, availability and information. The AI engine also facilitates direct bookings from users through AI agents, Rodriguez said.
Connect AI leverages Lighthouse's data, creating a data layer with comprehensive information from a hotel, then presenting it in the “ideal” way for LLMs to read. For things that don’t fall under the content umbrella, such as rates, availability and booking, the connection to real-time data is crucial, Rodriguez said.
“When you look now at the user experience in ChatGPT, for example, everything is static, and if you ask for a price, those prices are not real, they are stored, that is language,” he said. “But in our case, it’s not language, it’s actually a piece of data. We can say that this room can be quoted for x amount of money.”
“We are mixing the world of data and content for planning with the actual completion of the funnel,” he said.
The AI engine is being launched in an early access program and is available to select hotel partners, Lighthouse said.