How to Beat the OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia) at AI Search

AI Picked an OTA: Why Booking.com Wins by Default (and How Hotels Can Fight Back)

We noticed something recently that every hotel marketer needs to understand.

When ChatGPT recommends your hotel and sends a guest to your hotel's Booking.com page, Booking quietly reroutes them. Not to your property page.

They remove the UTM source and instead route guests to an infinite scroll feed for your entire destination.

Your guest lands on a page showing every hotel in town, sorted by Booking's algorithm, with your property somewhere in the mix. Even though ChatGPT wanted to send that guest to a page about your hotel.

It's subtle. It's clever. And it's a perfect example of how OTAs are already winning the AI distribution game before most hotels even realize it's started.

AI Is a Brand New Distribution Channel

Guests are changing how they find hotels. Instead of typing into Google or going straight to Booking.com, they're asking ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude.

LLMs have become a meta-layer across search, OTAs, and brand.com. And right now, they default to whatever is easiest to parse and most complete. That means OTAs win by default. Which means best case scenario you're paying 18%+ commission for a guest who the AI told to pick your hotel. And now Booking isn't even going to show that guest the page ChatGPT suggested.

Here's why OTAs like Booking win: Booking and Expedia has standardized, machine-readable content across every property. They have deep market coverage. They have clear paths from property info to rates to checkout. For an LLM trying to answer "where should I stay?", Booking is the easy answer.

Even when a guest's intent is your hotel specifically, the outcome is often an OTA listing; or worse, a competitor down the street.

This is happening upstream of SEO and SEM, at the AI-assistant layer. Before anyone searches. Before anyone clicks.

Why Traditional SEO/SEM Isn't Enough

In the old world, you optimized pages, built backlinks, and bid on keywords. You intercepted demand through 10 blue links on a search results page.

In the AI world, guests don't see 10 blue links. They see a single conversational answer. LLMs don't rank pages. They synthesize from sources they can parse reliably.

Here's the technical gap: most hotel websites don't expose structured catalogs of rooms and offers in ways LLMs can easily use. Rates and availability are hidden behind complex booking flows designed for humans to click. Marketing copy, images, and pricing are mixed in formats that are hard for AI to reason about.

Competing for AI traffic isn't a keyword problem. It's a content structure and systems problem.

What OTAs Built (and Why LLMs Love Them)

OTAs have uniform schemas for hotels, rooms, amenities, and rates. They have predictable URL structures and internal linking. This is perfect for crawling and parsing. They offer clear paths from property info to dates to rates to booking.

For an LLM, this means: "I know how to fetch all the hotels in this city, filter them, and find which one best matches this guest's request. I know exactly where to send them to check availability and pricing."

The Booking.com redirect we saw—sending ChatGPT traffic to a destination feed instead of a single property page—is a product decision that keeps AI-generated traffic inside their marketplace. It optimizes for market-level conversion, not a single hotel's direct channel.

That's the advantage of owning the infrastructure.

The Hotel Response: Build an AI-Native Storefront

Hotels need a first-party environment designed specifically for AI assistants and the apps they power. Not just a website. An AI storefront.

An AI storefront combines three things:

• Structured hotel, room, and offer data (catalog)
• Marketing content (stories, images, experiences)
• Live rates and availability (checkout)

It gives AI-readable pages and APIs that describe your hotel, rooms, offers, and policies in structured formats. It provides clear, machine-friendly routes from "describe the stay" to "find the right room" to "check price" to "book direct."

This is what Kismet builds. Your hotel's "robot website." But instead of rerouting the guest to an infinite scroll, we reroute guests to your awesome human-website that you've always sent guests to. We handle the version of your brand designed for AI, not just humans.

Matching OTA Rigor

To compete with OTAs in AI, you need to meet their bar on content structure:

• Rooms and rate plans modeled in structured data (room types, bed types, occupancy, policies)
• Offers and packages exposed with machine-readable terms and eligibility
• Rate and availability endpoints that AI agents can follow reliably

LLMs need clarity: "What is this room? For whom is this offer? How do I check the price for these dates?"

When your AI storefront answers those questions as cleanly as an OTA, assistants have no reason to default away from you.

Going Beyond OTAs

Here's where it gets interesting. OTAs only know what you send them: static photos, basic amenity lists, plain-text descriptions.

Your first-party AI storefront can do more.

Video: Room walkthroughs, pool and spa tours, short-form social clips embedded as structured stories.

Images: Curated sets by room, view, and experience—"sunrise balcony," "kid-friendly pool day."

UGC and social proof: Influencer reels, guest-generated content (with permission), press coverage and awards linked as verifiable citations.

Why this matters: LLMs can blend these rich assets into more persuasive, tailored recommendations. "You said you're traveling with kids and love pool. This hotel has a great family pool and a lot of recent guest content about it."

Your hotel becomes more interesting to AI than the thin, standardized OTA feed.

What Kismet Makes Easy

You shouldn't have to replatform your entire site to serve AI. Kismet handles the structured catalog, the AI-readable routes, and the integration to your existing CRS and booking engine.

We're building a series of posts that go deeper on specific features:

• How we turn your existing video, images, and social content into structured AI-ready stories
• How we model offers and packages so AI can actually recommend them (not just your lowest rate tonight)
• How we measure AI-driven discovery and direct bookings—so you can see this channel working

If you'd like to see what an AI storefront would look like for your hotel, reach out at.

The Simple Truth

OTAs have already built their storefronts for AI. They're good at this. The question isn't whether guests will ask assistants where to stay. It's whether those assistants will see your hotel as a first-class citizen.

An AI storefront is how you make sure the answer is yes.

Always your brand. Never ours.