Intermediaries such as Expedia and Booking.com have formed partnerships with artificial intelligence (AI) providers, creating uncertainty about the future of hotel distribution.

At The Phocuswright Conference, Kristie Goshow, former chief commercial officer of Peregrine Hospitality, Jean-Jacques Morin, group deputy CEO of Accor, Adam Harris, CEO of Cloudbeds, and Lennert de Jong, CEO of citizenM Hotels, touched on search’s evolution with AI and what it means for hotels.

"We're all worrying about—are we going to get disintermediated?” said Goshow.

De Jong said that the distribution game has been “a bit of a lost battle” for hotels on the whole. 

"Anthropic just released Anthropic Interviewer, a Claude-powered research tool that conducts and analyzes qualitative interviews at scale — debuting with findings from 1,250 professionals on how they’re navigating AI in their work. The details: Anthropic Interviewer handles the full research pipeline: planning questions, running 10–15 minute conversations, and clustering themes for human analysts."

Developer Advocate chez Google Cloud, Guillaume Laforge propose son panorama de ce qui fonctionne vraiment dans les architectures d’agents IA. Pour celui qui contribue à la fois à des frameworks IA et à la structuration de communautés de développeurs, le sujet dépasse largement le simple effet de mode et mène à une transformation en profondeur de la manière dont on conçoit des systèmes intelligents. Patterns, anti-patterns… Comment construire un système fiable et déconstruire des idées déjà reçues.

As AI becomes more ubiquitous, reports show growing gaps both in digital skills and access to resources needed to thrive in this new world. The rapid scale and pace of change also make it more critical to understand not just who is adopting new technologies, but how we are using them and who is truly benefiting. 

Addressing these challenges is central to the work of Cisco’s Digital Impact Office, which is dedicated to expanding digital inclusion and connecting more people to the global digital economy. As part of our commitment, we also partnered with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to create the Digital Well-being Hub, which dives deeper into the complex relationships between AI and digitization as well as their impact on people’s lives and well-being. 

The global OTA landscape is far larger and more uneven than most of the industry conversation suggests. At 10 Minutes Hotel, we have been conducting an extensive research project mapping every OTA we can identify and comparing them through one simple metric that offers a surprisingly clear signal. Estimated organic traffic. Although far from perfect, it provides an objective way to understand who actually drives demand at scale.

The early findings are eye opening. The public narrative about which platforms dominate is not aligned with the data. Airbnb generates a constant stream of headlines, yet it does not even break into the global top five OTAs by organic traffic. Expedia has long been considered the closest rival to Booking, but when looking only at the Expedia.com domain, its organic reach sits at about 41 million monthly visits. Booking.com, by contrast, reaches around 274 million.

"The arrival of artificial intelligence is introducing three profound disruptions in hotel distribution and the direct channel:

Conversational language. Many guests now prefer asking questions and receiving precise, multichannel answers instead of navigating long pages. Offering a fully conversational AI agent is increasingly important. Our AI agent Sarai meets this need.
Visibility in AI assistants powered by LLMs. Unlike Google Search, LLMs such as GPT, Gemini and Perplexity have not published official criteria for appearing organically in their results. Concepts like GEO or AIO are often mentioned, but the reality is that there is no clear or scientific methodology—everything comes from experimentation.
Official content and agentic capabilities. The strategic challenge for hotels is twofold: delivering official, verified and structured content to the AI assistants operating on these LLMs, and enabling agentic capabilities so assistants can take actions on behalf of the guest, such as completing a booking. Both objectives converge in a new component of the hotel tech stack: an MCP server."

"Standing at a hotel reception desk, tired from travel, only to be told the system won’t let us into our room? In hospitality, technology is meant to streamline and elevate the guest experience, but what happens when it does the opposite? This article dives into the hidden emotional cost of tech failures in hotels, revealing how even the sleekest systems can backfire and why the human touch still matters more than ever.

Tech Trouble – Who’s to Blame?
For several decades, hotels and restaurants have been investing heavily in digitalizing their service to enhance guest experiences. Property Management Systems (PMS), mobile check-in, digital keys, and ordering apps now play a vital role at multiple touchpoints of the customer journey. Yet, technology remains a paradox: it can be both a source of efficiency and a source of frustration."

COMMENT RENDRE SON SITE « IA-FRIENDLY »?
OpenAI et d’autres plateformes ont créé des standards pour faciliter l’exploration de votre contenu par les intelligences artificielles. Le principal outil : le fichier ai.txt, un équivalent moderne du robots.txt.

Ce fichier indique aux IA quelles pages elles peuvent explorer, lesquelles sont interdites, où se trouve votre sitemap et à quelle fréquence revisiter vos contenus. En ajoutant des métadonnées structurées (via Schema.org), vous rendez votre site beaucoup plus lisible pour une IA. Un hôtelier pourrait par exemple ajouter des données de type « Hotel » sur son site web, incluant le nom, l’adresse, les services offerts, les politiques d’annulation et la disponibilité saisonnière.

Generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) could shift the hotel distribution balance, and suppliers stand to benefit.

At The Phocuswright Conference in San Diego, Richard Holden, former general manager of Google Travel, Stephen Kaufer, founder and former CEO of Tripadvisor, and Sanjay Vakil, CEO and co-founder of DirectBooker, discussed how AI is changing the “front door” of hotel booking.

According to Holden, AI is likely to change travel aggregators' power and position. "I do think new front doors are going to be created here," Holden said. "From a supplier perspective, that's an opportunity to change the dynamic that's existed for the past 20 years.”

In many ways, Holden said suppliers were outmaneuvered by online travel agencies (OTAs) in terms of maximizing entry points with travelers. Now, there's an opportunity for suppliers to connect with consumers more directly.

"Cisco's AI Readiness Index measures how global companies are preparing for AI - and, for the first time, links readiness to real business value."

Museum leaders and AI developers gathered at UNESCO General Conference to imagine how artificial intelligence can transform the way we experience our shared heritage at an event held by UNESCO in partnership with the Uzbekistan Arts and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF) and with support from the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts and the French Ministry of Culture.

Disponible uniquement sur la version desktop, la fonctionnalité, propulsée par l’IA, reprend le même principe que celle dédiée aux podcasts, qui a largement contribué au succès de NotebookLM ces derniers mois.

D’abord conçue pour les étudiants, les chercheurs et les professionnels, Audio Overviews est capable d’ingérer des sources dans plusieurs formats (PDF, texte, graphiques, extraits audio, enregistrements vocaux, vidéos YouTube, etc.) pour les convertir en une vidéo explicative, « composée de diapositives commentées par l’IA », précise Google dans une page d’aide, et dont le sujet et la trame sont définis dans le prompt. En plus de condenser et synthétiser les informations pour pondre un contenu « clair et digeste », Audio Overviews peut extraire des images, des diagrammes, des citations ou des chiffres provenant de vos sources pour illustrer la vidéo. « Cela fait [des Video Overviews] un outil particulièrement efficace pour expliquer des données, démontrer des processus et rendre des concepts abstraits plus concrets », soulignait Google lors du lancement.