Guests now find hotels in entirely new ways. Rather than heading to search engines like Google or online travel agents like Booking.com, they now increasingly turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude.
This shift of traffic presents significant challenges for hotel owners, but can also deliver impressive rewards for those able to adapt and attract valuable traffic from these AI platforms. Here’s Kooba’s guide to improving the AI visibility of your hotel brand:
A new form of discovery
In many ways, LLMs like ChatGPT are perfect for planning holidays and trips. These tools can understand the specific context of each user, and can pair them with accommodation and experiences perfectly tailored to their needs.
This also means that visitors will expect more context from potential hotels. A guest may want to know if the restaurant serves vegan food, whether the hotel is suitable for a young family, if there are quiet rooms for business travellers, or if the surrounding area has enough to do for a rainy weekend. These details may seem small, but they are exactly the kind of information that can create (or lose!) a booking.
Unfortunately, many hotels have become over-reliant on OTAs, meaning they now lack the digital presence to surface on these detailed AI queries. This is doubly painful, as the guests most likely to seek greater context are also the most likely to spend more on a room.
GEO: The secret ingredient to AI visibility
So how can your hotel appear within these AI conversations?
The main method to accomplish this is known as generative engine optimisation (GEO). Just as you might optimise your website and content to draw traffic from search engines (SEO), you can also make improvements to attract visits from AI platforms.
Many of the elements of GEO overlap with those of SEO. Clear, well-structured content that is useful to your audience will always perform well, especially if it is connected in rational ways to other pages and websites. Likewise, a high-performing website with fast loading times and semantic HTML code will be more accessible to both traditional and AI search tools.
In other words, a well built website will cover the basics of GEO. With that said, there are additional steps you can take to drive more inbound traffic for AI sources.
How your hotel can gain traffic from AI channels
In order for LLMs to surface your hotel brand more frequently, you’ll need to provide easily accessible information that matches the most common queries of users. Here’s some ways that you can do exactly that:
Check your content
Most hotel websites don’t contain enough content or information to satisfy niche queries from potential guests. As a first step, you can audit your existing content, and check to see if there are any large gaps or missing areas.
Build out service pages
One convenient way to store all of this content is within specialised service pages. If, for instance, your hotel contains a restaurant and a spa, you can create pages dedicated to these specific offerings. This allows you to organise information in a rational and accessible way, which makes it easier for AI tools to retrieve. A restaurant page, for example, could contain a menu, a seat-map, and some imagery.
Use FAQs
Another great way to display more niche information is via FAQs modules. These not only allow for more obscure content to be hidden from most viewers, but also provide LLMs with similar matches to common user questions, as well as direct answers from your brand.
As a great example, see our FAQ section on the Killarney Park Hotel website: https://www.killarneyparkhotel.ie/unwind/the-spa
Implement schema
To add further depth and context to the content displayed on your website, you can write additional schema within the HTML of your site. This schema is not visible for regular users, but helps search engines and AI tools better understand your website.
Schema is not a silver bullet for creating AI visibility, but it can be very useful in certain contexts. You can read our full article on the subject here: https://www.kooba.ie/journal/is-schema-the-secret-to-audience-acquisition-kooba-investigates
Backend optimisation
Finally, an effective (if old-fashioned) method for increasing traffic from AI and traditional sources is simply improving the performance of your website. Faster loading-times, better structured context, and clearer HTML will all contribute to improved digital visibility.
The big opportunity: Escaping OTA dominance
As we’ve argued before at Kooba, many hotels suffer from imbalanced reliance on OTAs, which claim an estimated 13% of revenue from many hotels via commission fees. In large part this stems from an inability of hotels to compete with these OTAs for search, which results in a decrease in direct bookings.
However, LLMs do not respond to queries in the same ways as traditional search engines, and AI platforms provide hotels with a chance to gain direct bookings on a fair playing field. By embracing GEO and improving their AI visibility, hotels can regain lucrative revenue, and rebalance their relationships with OTAs.
To learn more about GEO and start driving traffic to your hotel’s website today, you can contact our team today. We’d love to hear about your specific requirements.
