AI Is Changing How Travelers Choose Hotels. Here’s Who Gets Recommended.

First came the wake-up call: AI has killed SEO for luxury hotels.

Now comes the follow-up question, and it’s even more uncomfortable: if AI is deciding which hotels get found, whose voices is it trusting?

That was the focus of Invisible or Influential?, a new white paper from Spotlight Communications and Make Lemonade presented at a breakfast at the One Aldwych Hotel in London this week. This new study builds on Spotlight’s earlier work on AI-driven hotel visibility, but shifts the lens from hotel brands to the media ecosystem surrounding them.

Because AI does not inherently know which hotel to recommend, it learns from what it can find, read and connect: editorial coverage, brand content, archives, reviews, PR signals and repeated associations. The question is who AI is trusting and why, and how the media and luxury travel companies need to adapt.

The white paper findings were presented by Lucy Clifton, CEO of Spotlight Communications, and Maria Sze of Make Lemonade and based on new research that combined in-depth interviews with journalists and deep research with AI itself. Using prompts designed to reflect real ultra-high-net-worth traveler behavior, they tested 30 luxury lifestyle and travel titles across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.

L to R: Paul Croughton, Maria Sze, Paula Rison-Gray, Uwern Jong, and Lucy Clifton

The presentation was followed by a panel moderated by Maria Sze, featuring Paul Croughton, Editor-in-Chief of Elite Traveler; Uwern Jong, Chief Experientialist at OutThere; Paula Rison-Gray, Director of Marketing & Communications at One Aldwych; and Lucy Clifton.

In writing this recap, there is an unavoidable irony. Talking about how AI finds, reads and surfaces editorial content means this recap should probably be a neat list of takeaways with clear subheads and fact anchors.

So, naturally, here we are.

The booking journey is no longer linear

For years, we have talked about the travel booking journey as though it were a neat funnel: awareness, consideration, decision, booking. Those days are gone.

AI now sits across the whole journey. A traveller might read a magazine feature, ask ChatGPT for hotel ideas, check a brand website, ask Claude for comparisons, look at reviews, go back to AI for validation and then book through a travel advisor, directly with the hotel or somewhere else entirely.

More importantly, AI is not only helping travelers choose between options. It is helping decide which options make the shortlist in the first place.

That changes the question for hoteliers. It is no longer simply: are we visible? It is: are we being surfaced repeatedly, in the right context, when recommendations are being generated?

The visibility gap is real

Across major AI platforms, commercial blogs, specialist content sites and utility-led travel platforms are often outperforming premium editorial publications in luxury travel queries. Not because they are necessarily more trusted or better written, but because they are easier for AI systems to interpret, retrieve and surface because of their specific details and authority.

Put simply: authority that cannot be extracted cannot be cited.

So, you can have years of prestigious coverage behind you, but if AI cannot read, understand or cite that coverage, it may not help you appear when a traveler asks where to stay.

Your archive is not neutral

One of the most surprising findings was that AI does not only read new content; it reads everything it can access and older content hurts credibility. Outdated facts weaken authority signals and make current journalism less likely to surface.

Uwern Jong, Chief Experientialist at OutThere, described reviewing, deleting or reworking around 700 articles as part of a systematic audit. “It’s heartbreaking as a writer,” he said, “but archiving is key.”

For hotels, an old feature mentioning a former general manager, closed restaurant, outdated room count, old spa concept or no-longer-accurate brand partnership is likely working against you. Based on the Spotlight research, the fix is not deletion but refresh, because older content updated with current facts and date-stamped can actually work better than a new article with no history behind it.

For hotel PR and marketing teams, owned channels, press materials and evergreen content also now need regular audits. AI surfaces a lot, but not necessarily the correct version.

Maria Sze and Lucy Clifton, authors of the series on AI and luxury travel

Depth, clarity and consistency are winning

The encouraging news is that depth can beat scale. The research suggests specialist publications with genuine topical authority can outperform much larger generalist titles in AI citation, and the same logic applies to hotels.

Clear, repeated and well-supported association with a specific experience, audience or value, is the best approach. A hotel cannot be everything to everyone, and in the AI-aided discovery environment, it may not need to be. A niche is no longer a limitation. It may be the strongest signal you have, especially in luxury, where being surfaced in the wrong context can be as unhelpful as not being surfaced at all.

Print is making a surprise comeback

One of the more surprising findings was the renewed role of print, not as the main discovery tool, but as a slower, more sensory way to inspire travel. As noted in the white paper: “AI is increasingly used to find; print is still used to feel.” Paul Croughton, Editor-in-Chief of Elite Traveler, echoed this on the panel, "Editorial can tell you how the coffee smells. AI cannot smell. Not yet, anyway." Luxury travelers are turning more and more to print for writing that captures the texture of a place, and what they can expect while there.

During the Q&A, Pavia Rosati, founder of Fathom, shared the story of a friend who used AI to plan a trip to the Amalfi Coast. The itinerary looked exciting and even included a spa day. The spa looked on a map to be a few kilometers away, but in reality, it would be two hours each way on a narrow, winding coastal road.

That is where human judgement still wins. AI can produce an itinerary that looks well researched, but editors, travel advisors, PRs and hoteliers with lived experience can immediately spot when a recommendation does not work in real life. In luxury travel, taste, context and trust are the difference between a trip that looks good on screen and one that actually works.

Luxury's fundamentals haven't changed

AI can summarise, compare and shortlist. It can produce an itinerary that looks amazing. It can also get things very wrong with great confidence! What it cannot do is tell you what a place actually feels like. That is where editors, travel advisors, PRs and hoteliers still come in.

Luxury’s fundamentals have not changed; trust, knowledge, emotion and distinctive points of view still decide whether a recommendation is meaningful. If anything, AI has made human expertise even more valuable.

But expertise only helps if it can be found. For hoteliers, that means keeping the storytelling, but making the details sharper: be specific, stay current, know what you want to be recommended for, and make sure your best coverage, strongest proof points and most distinctive experiences can be understood by both humans and the AI tools now guiding them.

Because in the new world of AI-mediated discovery, being seen is only the beginning. The real win is being surfaced again and again, exactly when the traveler is ready to ask.

The full Invisible or Influential? white paper from Spotlight Communications and Make Lemonade goes deeper into the research, including how different AI platforms surface luxury travel media. [Read it here.]