For a travel or hospitality brand, AI visibility is whether an assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity names your hotel, destination, or tour operator when a traveler asks it for recommendations, comparisons, or an itinerary, which a meaningful share of travelers are already doing. The industry's own research shows a split worth paying attention to: travelers are comfortable asking AI for ideas and planning help, but they still do not trust it much with the actual booking, and they still lean on independent sources more than on AI output alone. That gap is exactly where earned coverage does its work.
Sources: IMG's 2026 Travel Outlook Survey and ABTA's Holiday Habits 2025-26 report, both linked in the article.
How many travelers are actually using AI to plan trips?
About a third, and climbing from a smaller base the year before.
IMG's 2026 Travel Outlook Survey of its own customer base found 33% likely to use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Claude to help plan travel in 2026. Among that group, the uses break down clearly: 75% expect to use AI for recommendations, 70% for itinerary planning, 69% for discovery and ideas, 55% for comparisons, and only 13% for booking itself. That last number is the one to sit with. Travelers are happy to let AI suggest where to go and what to do once they arrive, but they are not yet letting it complete the transaction.
That planning-heavy pattern lines up with a separate measure from the UK's travel trade association. ABTA's Holiday Habits 2025-26 report, based on a nationally representative sample of 2,001 UK adults surveyed in late July 2025, found 8% now use AI tools for travel inspiration, up from 4% a year earlier, doubling in twelve months even if the absolute share is still small. Different market, different methodology, same direction: AI is entering the early, exploratory part of the trip, not the end of it, and it is growing fast from wherever it started.
Why does trust stay so low even as usage climbs?
Because travel is an expensive, high-stakes purchase, and most consumers are not ready to hand that decision to a system they cannot fully verify.
Booking.com's Global AI Sentiment Report, based on more than 37,000 consumers across 33 markets, found that only 6% fully trust AI with their travel plans, while 91% have at least one concern about using it. At the same time, 89% of those surveyed said they want to use AI in future travel planning, which is not a contradiction so much as a description of exactly where the trust gap sits: enthusiasm for the convenience, caution about the stakes. The same report found AI assistants were already a more trusted source for travel ideas than travel bloggers or social media influencers, at 24% versus 19% and 14% respectively, which says something important: AI has already overtaken some of the creator-economy channels hospitality brands have spent years courting, even while it still trails trusted brands and real human advice for the decisions that matter most.
What does an AI assistant actually lean on when it recommends a hotel or destination?
The same kind of input it leans on everywhere else: independent writing it can verify against other sources, not a brand's own marketing copy.
An assistant asked to recommend a hotel in a given city, or a tour operator for a specific trip, is synthesizing from whatever reporting, guidebooks, review platforms, and travel press it can access and cross-check. Earned media carries disproportionate weight in these answers across categories, because an independent travel writer describing what a property or destination is actually like reads as a far more reliable source than the property's own website. This is the same dynamic covered in how PR and SEO now overlap for AI visibility generally: the traveler who used to scroll through search results now gets a synthesized answer, and the brands quoted or described in that answer are the ones that show up.
Does a thin or inconsistent review record hurt here?
Yes, more than in most categories, because travel decisions lean so heavily on other travelers' direct experience.
A thin or inconsistent pattern of customer reviews gives an AI system little solid material to repeat, while a property or operator with a clear, specific, and current review record gives it something concrete: what kind of room, what kind of service, what actually went wrong or right for a real guest. Combine that review signal with independent trade and travel press coverage, and you have the two inputs that matter most for this industry specifically, because both describe the experience from outside the brand's own voice.
What should a hospitality or travel brand actually do differently?
Treat AI visibility as a planning-stage problem first, since that is where travelers say they are already using it, and build the inputs that earn a mention there.
- Pursue coverage in travel trade press and destination media that describes your property or experience in specific, verifiable terms, since that is the material an assistant can cross-check and repeat, far more than a general hospitality PR effort aimed only at a local market.
- Keep review profiles current and detailed, because the planning stage where AI usage is highest is exactly the stage where a traveler, or the assistant helping them, is comparing specific guest experiences.
- Do not expect AI to replace your booking funnel yet. With booking intent at only 13% among AI users in IMG's survey, the practical opportunity right now is getting recommended during research, not closing the sale inside a chat window.
- Make basic factual information about your property or destination easy for a crawler to read, separate from the marketing layer built for a human visitor, since an assistant needs clean facts, not persuasive copy, to describe you accurately.
What is the honest caveat here?
That both surveys cited above measure self-reported intent and sentiment, not an independently verified rate of how often AI assistants actually name specific hotels, operators, or destinations in their answers. IMG's sample is drawn from its own customer base, and Booking.com has a direct commercial interest in how AI affects travel booking behavior, so both numbers describe stated attitudes rather than observed citation data. The honest read is that traveler behavior is clearly shifting toward AI assistance for the planning stage of a trip, faster than most hospitality brands' own communications have adjusted to it, which is reason enough to start building earned visibility for that research moment now.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
How does AI visibility work for travel and hospitality brands? A growing share of travelers, roughly a third by one industry survey, already use AI tools to plan trips, mostly for recommendations and itineraries rather than booking, while trust in AI for the purchase itself stays low. Showing up well in that planning moment depends on earned travel and trade press coverage, a detailed and current review record, and destination or property information a crawler can actually parse, not on building a booking bot inside your own app.
If you want to know what AI assistants currently say about your property or destination compared with competitors, get in touch and we will map it with you.
