Während in Brüssel noch um die Regulierung der klassischen Google-Suche gerungen wird, entwickelt die Suchmaschine sein Geschäftsmodell bereits in Richtung KI-basierter, agentischer Systeme weiter. Erst am 23. Juli 2026 verhängte die Europäische Kommission gegen Google Geldbußen von insgesamt 890 Millionen Euro wegen Verstößen gegen den Digital Markets Act (DMA). Davon entfallen 460 Millionen Euro auf die aus Sicht der Kommission unzulässige Selbstbevorzugung eigener Dienste in der Google-Suche – ausdrücklich auch bei Hotel-, Shopping-, Transport- und Sportergebnissen. Google soll seine eigenen Angebote prominenter dargestellt und damit Drittanbieter benachteiligt haben.

Gerade für die Hotellerie ist diese Entscheidung von besonderer Bedeutung: Während der DMA bisher darauf zielt, faire Wettbewerbsbedingungen innerhalb der traditionellen Suchergebnisse sicherzustellen, verschiebt Google die Nutzerreise zunehmend in eine neue Umgebung. Mit AI Mode, Gemini und agentischen Buchungsfunktionen geht es künftig nicht mehr nur darum, welche Hotel- oder Buchungsangebote auf einer Suchergebnisseite wie prominent erscheinen. Vielmehr könnte die Google-KI selbst Hotels auswählen, vergleichen, empfehlen und schließlich die Buchung innerhalb ihrer eigenen Oberfläche initiieren oder sogar vollständig abwickeln. Damit stellt sich perspektivisch die Frage, wie die Wettbewerbsregeln des DMA auch in einer Welt greifen, in der klassische Suchergebnislisten zunehmend durch KI-generierte Antworten und digitale Agenten ersetzt werden.

Google entwickelt sich vom Informationskanal zum Transaktionskanal – ohne Vertriebspartner zu werden

Google hat in den USA einen begrenzten Test für Hotelbuchungen über den AI Mode seiner Suchmaschine gestartet. Booking Holdings gehört nach Angaben von Konzernchef Glenn Fogel zu den ersten Partnern. Damit geht Google bei der Reiseplanung einen weiteren Schritt von der KI-gestützten Suche in Richtung Buchung.

Google testet seit Anfang August agentische Hotelbuchungen im AI Mode. Ein Sprecher des Unternehmens bestätigte dem Branchenportal Skift am 7. August 2026, dass in den USA ein begrenzter Test begonnen habe. Weitere Einzelheiten zum Umfang des Tests nannte Google zunächst nicht.

Airbnb’s hotel initiative was the dominant topic of conversation during the company’s second quarter earnings call on Thursday night.

“The hotel initiative is going significantly better than I expected, and I had high expectations,” Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said while addressing one of many questions about the vertical.

Chesky said he was unsure how hotels would be received, given that Airbnb is known for homes, but that’s where his expectations “were not high enough.”

“After we began outreach for hotels, things flipped, and what we are now seeing is a huge amount of influx of interest from hotels wanting to list on Airbnb,” he said.

"Travel search is auctions stacked on auctions: everyone demands fairness from the layer above while selling position to the layer below.

The European Commission fined Alphabet €460 million this week, about $525 million, for favoring Google’s own services in search. The ruling covered hotel and transport results and formed the search portion of a larger €890 million penalty.

The travel industry cheered, with EU Travel Tech, whose members include Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Airbnb, and Tripadvisor, calling the decision a milestone for fair and open digital markets.

The applause deserves a closer look. With Airbnb as the exception, nearly every company demanding fair treatment from Google also lets travel suppliers pay for better visibility in its own marketplace. Their formal complaint is about allocation: a dominant Google gives its own units the best real estate on the page and pushes consumers into its own auction. That complaint is fair. The same conflict repeats at every level of travel search."

Aside from artificial intelligence (AI), trust was the most used word at Phocuswright Europe 2026 last month.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given how often the word has been used by the bosses of online travel giants recently as they figure out their futures.

“I do have to wonder, though, whether trust is just a new word for something actually working,” said Lisa Katsouraki, an independent advisor for Ennea Capital Partners.

During a session to wrap up the main themes of the event, Katsouraki was joined by Timothy O’Neil-Dunne of travel and aviation consultancy T2Impact and Mario Gavira, CMO of Travelier.

Gavira said that while AI has been accepted as an efficiency driver and cost reduction tool, so far there have been no “consumer-facing AI killer features.”

Près de 90% des destina­tions touris­tiques utilisent déjà des outils d’IA, révèle une étude interna­tio­nale menée par la HES-SO Valais. Malgré cette progression, en Suisse comme ailleurs, peu d’entre elles utilisent l’IA comme outil de gestion stratégique. Que ce soit pour l’analyse de données ou la prise de décision, par exemple.

"Retail and finance drove Google's search ad revenue this quarter. But Google chose travel — IHG for its newest ad format, Booking Holdings for cloud and AI-powered transactions — to show investors where its AI business lines are converging. 

Travel made a cameo during Google's latest earnings call: Tech executives described how the company is applying artificial intelligence to search advertising, cloud services, and transactions, using travel to illustrate traction across all three.

Travel searches carry more usable details than most other categories, with dates, budgets, and desired destinations and amenities. The details give Google more signals for matching a paid offer to what a traveler is actually planning. "

Reisende lassen sich Hotels zunehmend von ChatGPT, Gemini und anderen KI-Systemen empfehlen. Doch eine erste Auswertung des von Online Birds entwickelten «AI Prompt Scores» zeigt: 34,3 Prozent der untersuchten Häuser in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz tauchen in keiner einzigen relevanten KI-Empfehlung auf. Für die Hotellerie beginnt damit ein neues Kapitel der digitalen Sichtbarkeit.

Evan Crawford of Pyramid Global Hospitality argues that as AI commoditizes hotel search and proposals, clear brand identity and genuine relationships become the primary competitive differentiators for hotel sales teams.

"No travel business has found the silver bullet yet in how to show up prominently on a consistent basis within the major LLMs. As these platforms evolve, such an achievement becomes a moving target.

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said Tuesday that the company saw pressure on organic search results from Google's AI Overviews in the second quarter, although it is a small part of overall business.

"I do believe that some of the changes that were made in the display at Google definitely put some pressure on SEO," Fogel told analysts during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

Booking spends billions of dollars annually on paid search, which is a much bigger part of its business than SEO. Fogel attributed the weakness to Google's AI Overviews, which generate summaries that sit at the top of search-results pages, downplaying the traditional blue links."

IHG Hotels & Resorts highlighted its involvement in Google's agentic artificial intelligence (AI) booking pilot Tuesday as it reported half-year 2026 results.

The hotel group said the pilot enables guests to book hotels, which are processed as direct bookings, within Google's AI Mode experience. Guests can also be redirected to the group’s website for loyalty member rates.

IHG said it is also part of Google’s Direct Offers pilot, which surfaces promotions with a user’s AI-assisted trip planning and a link to book on the group’s website. Earlier this year, Google said it was testing advertising formats, including Direct Offers in AI Mode, and said it was about “reinventing what an ad is” to “bridge inspiration and action.” 

The hotel industry knows how to plan for things going wrong. Disaster recovery playbooks, business continuity procedures, redundancy across reservations infrastructure—these are established disciplines. Most hotel CIOs have already pressure-tested their organizations against cyber incidents, outages and platform failures.
 
But there is a gap in almost every continuity plan written in the last three years, and it sits beneath one of the most significant technology shifts the sector has ever made.
 
The artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models underpinning revenue management systems, guest messaging platforms, virtual concierge tools and review response workflows are rarely under the direct control of hotel operators. Instead, they are typically supplied by third-party providers, often through software vendors already embedded within the wider technology stack.

Der Hotelverband Deutschland (IHA) fordert für agentische Buchungssysteme einen offenen, transparenten und diskriminierungsfreien Zugang für Hotels. Anlass sind unter anderem die neuen Buchungsfunktionen von Google. Nach Auffassung des Verbandes dürften solche Systeme nicht dazu führen, dass neue geschlossene Ökosysteme entstehen oder einzelne Anbieter darüber entscheiden, welche Hotels und Vertriebswege beim Gast ankommen.

IHA-Geschäftsführer Tobias Warnecke kündigt in einem Beitrag an, der Verband werde die Entwicklung auf deutscher und europäischer Ebene begleiten. Entscheidend seien aus Sicht des IHA Transparenz, Diskriminierungsfreiheit, Interoperabilität und ein gleichberechtigter Zugang zu den neuen KI-basierten Vertriebskanälen. Dies müsse unabhängig davon gelten, ob es sich um eine internationale Hotelkette oder einen einzelnen mittelständischen Betrieb handele.

Travel companies risk fines of up to 3% of their global turnover if they fall foul of new rules under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. The provisions require clear labeling of AI-generated content and transparency when customers are interacting with an AI system, such as a chatbot.

The travel industry is already using AI-generated content widely. A recent study by AI forensic company ContentGuard.me and German digital marketing group ABCD Agency examined 25,550 hotel photos across seven destinations, finding that AI generation or heavy editing had been used in roughly one in five images.

"Google has moved agentic hotel booking from promise to product test. But how much of the transaction — and customer relationship — it intends to control remains to be seen.

Google is now testing agentic hotel booking, a spokesperson confirmed to Skift. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel referenced the tests on an earnings call this week while discussing partnerships with AI platforms.

“I think Google may have come out today, a small percentage of their traffic seeing their agentic booking … we are one of the first with them,” Fogel said. “We've been working very hard with them as we have for many years, but working hard on this one.”

Google said it began a limited test this week for users in the United States, and tied it to plans it made last November for an upcoming agentic booking tool for flights and hotels. "

"As Brian Chesky tells it, AI seems to be really kicking in at Airbnb. Excluding the LLMs and hyper-scalers, he argues that Airbnb went from being a middle-of-the-pack AI company to "a leader in AI."

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said artificial intelligence is helping the company build and ship products dramatically faster, citing how it took up to nine months to develop the company's groceries business, but just six weeks to roll out airport pickups.

Chesky is trying to transform Airbnb into an AI-native company. Even as it launches new business lines — including hotels, experiences, and services — the core business of renting out rooms is accelerating: nights and seats booked grew 10% in the second quarter, outpacing room-night growth at both Expedia Group (6%) and Booking Holdings (5%)."

Les 100 premiers outils IA concentrent près de 90 % des visites web du marché. Un classement qui confirme la domination de ChatGPT et le recul des outils spécialisés.

"Amazon is betting that stored payment credentials, new MCP support and 180 million Prime members can solve the problem that stopped OpenAI cold: getting travelers to complete a purchase inside an AI conversation.

Amazon’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol for Alexa+ last week revealed several travel companies stepping up to be among the first partners. 

According to the tech company, Priceline, Viator, Virgin Atlantic, Lyft, Brightline, FlixBus, and Greyhound will build travel and transportation booking tools for Alexa+ later this year. Others will be able to connect their own MCP servers through the Alexa+ for Builders platform. A new wallet offering would also allow travelers to pay for trips using stored payment cards. 

For travel companies, the open questions are whether Amazon Wallet becomes a new booking channel, and who owns the traveler data it generates. "

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing hotel discovery: Travelers are no longer being shown five blue links when they search for a property. Those long-coveted slots have lost relevance seemingly overnight.

When travelers ask a question in ChatGPT or Gemini, the engines provide more complete answers than a simple link might, limiting the need for additional research. Travelers don’t need to look at a hotelier’s website to get a baseline understanding of the property they’re considering booking.

But AI optimization goes beyond marketing, with AI search also becoming the primary battleground for hoteliers to protect direct bookings.

Google verliert sein Monopol auf die Reise-Inspiration. Gäste suchen Hotels heute ebenso auf TikTok wie in ChatGPT oder Perplexity. Für die Hotellerie ist das keine technische Randnotiz, sondern eine strategische Verschiebung: Wer in sozialen Medien und KI-Antworten nicht vorkommt, verliert Sichtbarkeit, Direktbuchungen und mittelfristig Umsatz.