Why AI Decides Which Luxury Hotels Get Recommended
Guests now discover and evaluate luxury hotels through AI-powered search, and most properties are still marketing for the era before it. The hotels being recommended are not the ones with the best website. They are the ones with a strong, distributed brand presence across the web that AI reads and trusts, which is exactly the gap Curacity helps hotels close.
Discovery Moved, and Paid Media Can't Follow
The most useful idea from a recent ILHA conversation on luxury hotel marketing was also the most uncomfortable: the way guests find hotels has fundamentally changed, and paid media budgets no longer reach where that discovery happens.
Travelers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI summaries where to go and where to stay, rather than scanning a page of links and doing their own research. A property that is not part of the answer those tools generate is invisible at the exact moment a guest is deciding. For luxury operators, that reframes visibility from a marketing nicety into a commercial priority.
Getting Recommended Is Different From Getting Found
A key distinction surfaced in the discussion, courtesy of Curacity's Chief Business Officer, Arlo Laitin. Most hotels, he noted, are focused on getting their own house in order: a clean website, the right content, the technical pieces that let a language model read them. That work is necessary, but it is not what earns a recommendation.
What drives recommendations is what Laitin called a distributed brand footprint. Are publishers writing about the property? Are creators and third-party sources mentioning it across the web? AI forms its answers from that wider conversation, which means genuine brand presence beyond a hotel's own channels now matters more than ever.
The interesting nuance, backed by a Cornell study Curacity supported, is that luxury travelers use AI to discover and shortlist, then still want a human touch to book. AI decides who gets considered. The hotel closes the sale.
Earned Media Is the New Distribution
The sharpest reframe was about how hotels should treat coverage. Earned media can no longer be something a property passively hopes for. It has to be treated as distribution, a deliberate channel, because a hotel is either discovered by the language models or invisible to them, and therefore to guests.
That is where Curacity positions itself. By connecting hotels to trusted editorial content that both influences travelers and builds the third-party presence AI draws on, Curacity helps properties show up in the answers, not just in the search index. It also points to a new way to measure progress: recommendation share, how often a hotel appears when travelers ask about a topic relative to its competitors, is becoming a leading signal of whether a property is winning the discovery moment.
What This Means for Luxury Properties
The takeaway Laitin left the room with was straightforward: talk to your guests, and ask how they are using AI to find you. The behavior is shifting quickly, and the properties paying attention will move before their competitors do.
The broader lesson is that visibility has become a discipline in its own right. The hotels that build a real brand presence across the web, earn genuine third-party coverage, and partner to make sure AI can find and trust them are the ones that will keep getting recommended. As Laitin put it, if you are not investing in this today, you are already behind.
Curacity is a Partner of the International Luxury Hotel Association helping hotels, cruise lines, and destinations stay discoverable as AI reshapes travel planning. Learn more at curacity.com.
