Hotels are increasingly tailoring their AI-powered search and digital marketing strategies based on actual guest search patterns and preferences, aiming to improve online engagement and booking conversion rates. A query for a “boutique hotel in Paris with a great pool, good for couples, under 200 euros” requires the assistant to match several conditions at once. Hotel websites, amenity lists, and photo galleries cannot provide the depth of detail that guests now demand. The long tail of what guests wrote about staying at a property remains the only text capable of matching these complex, sentence-length requests.
The breakfast test
Hotel marketing often fails because it follows old Google strategies. The instinct is to write for the machine with more pages and keywords. Ben Jost, CEO of TrustYou, argues that hotels should describe what they offer and let guests describe it on top of that. If a property claims “the most amazing breakfast” but guests report it was not good, the assistant will down-rank the hotel for breakfast-related searches. The assistant reads the hotel’s own copy as a claim and reviews as evidence. When these disagree, the evidence wins and the claim costs the property visibility.
The hotels that lose under this rule are those whose websites were always slightly better than their breakfasts. The practical consequence is clear: a hotel with thin feedback is a hotel the assistant cannot describe. The assistant relies on review volume, recency, and content to match a query. Without enough data, it has nothing to match against.
Managing the data
Collecting more feedback than a hotel thinks it needs is the first step. Sending surveys on every channel gives the assistant something to match against and makes the score statistically honest. Making the feedback visible, including the bad reviews, helps as well. Publishing reviews on the hotel’s own site and replying to negative ones shows the assistant that the property pays attention. A visible, answered complaint can read as a hotel that cares. Attaching part of management’s bonus to the guest score forces teams to care, too. Operators stop looking at dashboards and start asking questions about housekeeping and comments.
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Organizational structures often block this shift. In many hotel groups, quality manages the feedback software, while marketing handles distribution. The teams that need the same data make decisions in separate rooms. A small cross-functional group should own both the score and visibility. The hotels that do this will be describable to an assistant. Those that do not will keep running two strategies for one asset.
When a guest asks a personal assistant for a hotel recommendation, they expect a suggestion made for them, not one made for whoever paid the most. For the first time in two decades, an independent hotel does not have to outspend a platform to be in the conversation with a guest. The industry is still working out how to connect with assistants, with a window of 12 to 24 months to adapt.
The way most hotel groups handle guest feedback is fragmented. This separation hinders effective decision-making, as both teams require the same data but operate independently.
