Hostel Doctor

Who is booking your beds? Are you working with OTAs, travel agencies, or is it AI bots?

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others could become travel agents themselves, cutting out OTAs instead of partnering with them.

Travel agencies like Expedia, Booking.com, and Trip.com risk becoming fulfillment arms of major AI chatbots with current trends.

The OTA model calls for travelers to join their loyalty programs, tap links from advertisers, and tack on extras. It’s likely that agentic AI will trigger a marketing competition between the major chatbots and OTA’s standalone agentic AI features.

Are you prepared? Who will end up booking your beds??

(This lovely room is at Latroupe Madrid)

📣 Despite the rumours Google has announced it is NOT planning to become an online travel agent (OTA) in the near future. What it is doing is building an ‘agent’ AI tool that can book flights, hotels, and more. 🤖 It will have partners including both large and small players in the travel market and link with them to provide a 360 experience. When they launch their AI travel assistant, it will have everything from flights to event tickets and restaurant reservations. 🎟️✈️

This means it will be part of a web that leads to a full travel experience - something no longer just a few steps and a marketing funnel. With more research on more platforms, including AI searches now using more keywords than Google searches, the customer is flooded with options for bookings, and Google will offer a one-stop-shop via and AI agent to offer a solution to all booking needs, and upsell to ones you didn’t know you needed. 💻

Join a talk on what gets really feel about sustainability during their stay...
*Sustainability in Hospitality: The Green Elephant in the Room*
Event by Alliance
Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 12:00CET
https://www.linkedin.com/events/7391836238259052546/

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