Eyeing an opportunity to grow direct bookings, hotels are pushing their technology partners to integrate live availability and pricing data into artificial intelligence (AI)-search platforms.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and others have become popular tools for vacation research, but to date, results have been limited to hotel descriptions and links.

But following OpenAI’s launch of “ChatGPT apps,” experts are predicting AI search platforms will soon be able to display real-time availability and rates. Once live, a dramatic shift in booking behaviors and patterns is expected, representing a real gamechanger for the accommodation sector.

The new ‘front door’ for travel

Startup DirectBooker is one such company poised to take advantage, and PhocusWire can reveal it is already working with property management system Eviivo and booking engine Mirai, as well as another as yet unnamed “large group,” according to Sanjay Vakil, DirectBooker's CEO and co-founder.

DirectBooker, which also counts former Tripadvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer and ex-Google Travel boss Richard Holden as backers and board members, looks to bypass online travel agencies (OTAs) and feed live hotel data to AI search platforms. The net result is a button or link that goes directly to the hotel’s booking engine.

“There's a strong belief this chat interface for travel is superior to the experience on search, and that as users get to interact with it a few times, they will prefer it,” Vakil said. “It’s the new front door in travel.”

DirectBooker isn’t the only one looking ahead to massive consumer appetite. Other software providers, including The Hotels Network and Apaleo, are also developing integrations.

Search fatigue

As well as the more conversational way to search, another driver is that the large language models will reduce the time spent researching a vacation.

Gwenael Merlin, EVP of strategic solutions and partnerships at Eviivo, cites Expedia’s Path to Purchase reports, which found travelers view an average of 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days prior to booking a trip.

“I mean, it's phenomenal,” he said. “ChatGPT, or AI, rather, as a whole, will potentially reverse that trend, specifically by improving the quality of the search, bringing up what people are really searching much faster or [providing] more tailored and customized responses.”

Vakil, a former product manager at Google who specialized in travel, agreed: “The internal data that I reviewed at Google was comparable. People view a lot of websites before making these purchases. If you keep opening up new tabs, you end up having multiple ways to purchase that hotel. There's ads or affiliate links on each of those pages.”

Supplier demand

The accommodation sector is clearly going to be supportive of any new pathway to direct bookings, not least to avoid paying the OTAs commission of anywhere up to 20% of the booking value.

One hotelier in the U.K.’s Lake District region said he was thinking ahead to when ChatGPT will allow people to book because of a recent spike in visitor traffic.

“We have seen ChatGPT come up as one of the referrals for the first time in our weekly reports,” said Thomas Ferrante, general manager of Gilpin Hotel & Lake House, at the recent Independent Hotel Show in London. “A month ago, they weren't in the top 15.”

He added that the hotel’s technology provider, Hart, was looking into integrations. “Currently, the [AI] links aren't brilliant to booking engines, so they can't get into availability yet. Once they can, it's going to be massive,” Ferrante said. “We spent a long time fighting Booking.com, so we really need to get links into ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and so on, not to go that way again.”

In the short-term rental sector, Casago said it was already seeing demand from its franchise partners.

“We are increasingly being asked: ‘How do we make sure our homes show up when someone books through AI?’” said chief digital officer David Angotti. “We’ve already started exploring how our data and pricing infrastructure can connect directly with generative platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.”

He said Casago was working with its channel partners and internal technology teams to ensure that when these AI booking experiences go mainstream, its inventory is both visible and bookable in real time.

Picking up speed

With the promise of access to 800 million users, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app showcase has created a buzz in the industry, and Juanjo Rodriguez, founder of The Hotels Network, likens its October 6 launch to Apple’s iPhone App Store launch in 2008.

“This is the same thing, it's opening the ecosystem,” he said. “It's a new space with a huge audience that grows really quickly. It's going to be a new discovery space for everything in the world, including hotels.”

The Hotels Network is looking to capitalize on the momentum through parent company Lighthouse and a new product called Connect AI, designed to bridge the gap between hotels and AI-powered search platforms.

Apaleo, meanwhile, told PhocusWire it was building a market-facing agent that lets hoteliers create their own ChatGPT app, which is connected directly to their Apaleo setup.

“This allows them to feed live property information, availability and rates into the app so guests can complete bookings directly within ChatGPT. In other words, Apaleo makes a hotel’s inventory and booking process actionable in ChatGPT,” said CTO Stephan Wiesener.

Update, review, refresh

With reports of a looming AI bubble, some industry observers encourage hoteliers to proceed with caution.

“AI is a big thing, but there's a lot of buzz behind that word as well,” said Liutauras Vaitkevicius, a technology consultant and former managing director at The Zetter.

“A lot of people talk about how you need to be detectable, not just to Google, not just to SEO but to AI. Now, AI has been trained on all those data sets anyway, so whether it's Google, or some other data set, it's still the source; the original source is still the internet,” he said.

As a result, he said hotels need to ensure they are constantly visible. “There are still so many hotels out there that use outdated technologies that don't update properly. Update, review, refresh, make sure you're relevant, make sure your information is up to date.”

For now, the travel industry is preparing for the moment when OpenAI opens its ecosystem beyond Expedia and Booking.com apps inside ChatGPT.

“It is very early days,” said DirectBooker's Vakil. “The number of people getting approved is, quite frankly, zero. And we are basically lining up, when that number grows above zero—we'll be one of those.”