A new era of search, finally...

📰 In This Issue

✔️ Direct bookings on AI chat to challenge OTAs.
✔️ Your Hotel's Social media matters more than ever.
✔️ OpenAI turning into a Marketplace? Soon OTA?
✔️ Meme Break: Lighthearted Humor
✔️ GuestChat - Convert those visitors
✔️ Key takeaways.

🌟 Spotlight: Innovative Tech of the Week

🔍 DirectBooker – an AI-focused startup launched by former leaders of Google Travel and TripAdvisor. Its goal is to link hotels directly with AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and more. Enabling customers to discover and book accommodations in real time through chat interfaces.

💡 “49% of people think AI will eventually replace search engines.”
That is a significant indication of where customers will find hotel rooms, especially younger, tech-savvy travelers searching for destinations, experiences, working holidays, and hybrid stays. Not only is search changing, but what people search for will change even more.

🚀 The rise of AI-driven travel planning presents a pivotal opportunity for hotels to escape their dependency on OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia. DirectBooker’s innovative MCP technology allows hotels to compete against OTAs and ultimately benefit from lower commissions, owning direct guest relationships, and personalized offerings to travelers.

📢 Industry Insights: Tourism & Tech News

📰 Google is indexing public Instagram posts, and hotels that have invested in social media are miles ahead.

🔗 Gamechanger for Business

💡 Two significant things stand out for hotels.
- Gen Z travelers are searching on Social platforms, replacing the dreaming phase of travel, allowing hotels to showcase through rich content.
- Hotels are adding multiple touch points to the booking journey. Understanding how to track these becomes even more important and allocating resources correctly.

It is still early days; however, hotels that have been sleeping on their social media platforms should act on this. Quality content builds brand awareness, reaches more internet users, and will ultimately be on the internet way longer than the ad you spent money on.

📊 OpenAI becomes an OTA, kinda.

📌 I’m getting ahead of myself, but I did also bet big on Tesla in 2012. OpenAI and Shopify announced a partnership in April. Allowing early foundation for checkouts in ChatGPT. Allowing OpenAI to take a cut from sales, and giving retailers an alternative platform to Google and other big online retailers.

How do hotels fit in? It’s the same Google hotels playbook, just the AI version of it.

The biggest difference is that OpenAI shows relevant content, not whoever has the biggest marketing budget. AIO is the SEO of the AI chat world. If your marketing team has not thrown around this abbreviation yet, they should.

Keep creating good, relevant content, keep an eye on OpenAI updates, and make sure whoever is in charge of your direct booking strategy is up to date on relevant changes.

🔗 Full FT article

😂 Meme of the Week

🎯 Sponsored Ad

Your hotel website gets hundreds (even thousands) of daily visitors who have questions before they book. If they don’t get answers to their questions quickly, they end up leaving.

If you’re lucky, your guests will book through an online travel agent, and you will end up paying a 15%+ commission. If not, they’ll book with another hotel, and you will have lost the opportunity.

That’s why we built GuestChat, an automated chat tool that answers website visitors’ questions instantly and gives them an easy way to book directly.

📌 Final Thoughts & What’s Coming Next

✨ Attention is hard to come by; use all the tools to find your guests.
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