While travel brands are certainly aware of artificial intelligence’s role in search and discovery, they’re not necessarily prepared.
An audit performed by destination content platform Obvlo in June found that less than a quarter of brands are AI ready.
The company looked at the top 20 brands by revenue across five sectors: tours, online travel agencies (OTAs), destination marketing organizations (DMOs), hotels and airlines. Obvlo did not reveal the names of the 100 audited companies.
One webpage from each brand was scored against a 100-point system. Brands could earn a total of points for infrastructure (crawl-accessibility, page speed, mobile readiness, etc.), 25 points for AI readiness (signals AI reads) and 50 points for page analysis (factual density, content depth, internal linking, etc.).
Tours, smallest revenue category, were found to be the most prepared, with an average score of 52, followed by OTAs (score of 43), DMOs (score of 38), hotels (score of 31) and airlines (score of 27).
Overall, only 23 of the audited brands scored higher than 60 points, earning them the “AI-ready” title. These companies were the ones publishing destination-led content, refreshing content more frequently, including more than six schema types per page and linking regularly to credible third-party sources, according to Obvlo.
When looking at travel brands by region, Europe was the clear winner.
“Europe leads on every measure: 35% of European brands are AI-ready, versus 21% in Asia-Pacific and just 12% in the Americas. The Americas, home to most of the world's tech industry, has both the lowest mean score (34.2) and the lowest AI-ready rate of any region,” the report reads.
“Nearly half of American brands sit at risk; another 39% are stuck in the partial zone, almost crossing the threshold but not making it. The ‘Silicon Valley dominance’ assumption overshoots in travel.”
Eighty-five of the 100 brands were also found to have “at least one significant failure.” FAQ markup was the most common, followed by structured data issues, sitemap issues and pagespeed.
“FAQ schema is the most-missed check in the dataset at 65% of brands. It's the lowest-effort layer-2 signal AI crawlers specifically read; AI assistants extract FAQ blocks almost verbatim into conversational answers. Cheapest fix on the list, most missed,” the report reads.
Obvlo recommended five changes for travel brands scoring less than 60, including adding FAQ schema, rolling out structured data, publishing an llms.txt file, adding visible dates for when content was last updated and focusing on destination-led content.