Do Travelers Actually Use ChatGPT to Plan Trips and Find Hotels in 2026? 41% of US Travelers Already Are.

More than 41% of US travelers now use ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or DeepSeek to plan trips and pick hotels — and the properties AI recommends are not the ones with the most Booking.com reviews.

That number is from Skift's January 2026 traveler survey cross-referenced with Phocuswright's 2026 US Consumer Travel Report. Hospitality is, by some distance, the local-services vertical where AI discovery has moved fastest. The combination of complex trip planning (multi-day, multi-leg, dietary-and-mobility-aware), high willingness to pay, and the natural fit between travel research and conversational AI has pushed adoption well past every other vertical we have measured.

Why this question matters right now

Three datasets converged in early 2026 and made the hospitality-AI question the most urgent in the local-services category.

First, Skift's January 2026 traveler survey: 41% of US travelers reported using ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or DeepSeek to plan or research a trip in the prior six months. The share among travelers booking trips over $5,000 was 53%. The share among under-35 travelers was 56%. This is not the early phase of a trend — for the leisure-traveler cohort that matters most to boutique hotel and DMC revenue, AI-assisted planning is now mainstream behavior.

Second, Phocuswright's 2026 US Consumer Travel Report: 38% of leisure travelers used an AI assistant during their hotel-selection process specifically. Of those, 71% reported that the AI's recommendation influenced their final hotel choice "moderately" or "significantly." That is a high downstream-conversion influence rate compared to other discovery channels (TripAdvisor reviews influence the final choice "moderately or significantly" for 64% of those who use them; Instagram for 41%).

Third, Hotel News Now and STR's joint 2026 operator survey: 27% of independent and boutique hotels reported "noticeable" referral traffic from ChatGPT or Perplexity, up from essentially zero in 2024. The top-of-funnel shift is now showing up in operator data, not just consumer surveys.

The honest summary, drawn from a senior travel-industry contact at Skift Forum 2026: "If a boutique hotel has been written up in Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, the New York Times Travel section, or the regional equivalent, ChatGPT will find them. If a hotel has 4.7 stars on Booking.com and no editorial press, ChatGPT will not."

That, broadly, is what the data shows.

Section 2 — The data: top AI queries travelers run

What travelers ask AI	% of AI-using travelers who run this monthly	Source
"Best boutique hotel in [city] for [trip type]"	52%	Skift Traveler Survey Jan 2026
"Things to do in [destination] in [month] for [audience]"	48%	Phocuswright US Consumer Travel 2026
"Family-friendly resort in [region] under [budget]"	31%	Skift Traveler Survey Jan 2026
"[City] private tour with [language / specialty]"	24%	Phocuswright US Consumer Travel 2026
"Multi-day itinerary for [destination] with [constraint]"	37%	Skift Traveler Survey Jan 2026
"Sustainable / B Corp / eco-certified hotel in [region]"	18%	Phocuswright US Consumer Travel 2026
"DMC for [region] [trip type]"	9%	Skift Traveler Survey Jan 2026

Two patterns. First, hospitality AI queries are much more constraint-heavy than restaurant or fitness queries. A traveler typically stacks four or five constraints in a single prompt: city + trip type + budget + audience + sustainability + language + month. LLMs handle that constraint stacking natively in a way Booking.com's filter UI struggles with, which is the structural reason AI is winning hospitality faster than other verticals.

Second, the multi-day itinerary query (37% monthly) is a new category that essentially didn't exist three years ago. Travelers are using AI as an itinerary-planner, not just a hotel-selector. Hotels and tour operators that show up as supporting infrastructure in those itineraries — "stay at X, do Y, eat at Z" — get cited in volume. Properties that are not part of any itinerary corpus do not.

Section 3 — Why your property probably isn't being cited

Five factors explain almost every "why doesn't ChatGPT recommend us" complaint we have seen from independent hotels, tour operators, and DMCs.

1. Booking.com and Expedia are eating your direct-citation surface. This is the single largest structural problem in hospitality AI visibility, and it is mostly invisible to operators. When a traveler asks ChatGPT "best boutique hotel in Lisbon," the AI very often cites Booking.com's editorial collection pages, Expedia's curated lists, or Hotels.com roundups — not your direct site. That means Booking.com is winning the citation surface even when your property is named, because the click goes through Booking.com (which then takes its commission). The fix is not to disable OTA listings; it is to build a strong-enough direct-site editorial surface that ChatGPT cites you in addition to the OTAs.

2. No third-party citation in Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, NYT Travel, AFAR, Skift, or the regional travel-press equivalent. The structural one. The travel-press corpus that LLMs cite is small and well-defined: Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, AFAR, NYT Travel section, the Telegraph Travel UK, Le Guide du Routard FR, Frommer's, Lonely Planet, Skift (for industry-side queries), regional in-flight magazines. A single feature in any of those is structurally more weight than several thousand Booking.com reviews. The press anchors the LLM's confidence; the reviews provide volume signal.

3. Tour operators not on GetYourGuide or Viator with detailed structured listings. GetYourGuide and Viator are the marketplaces ChatGPT preferentially cites for "things to do" and "private tour" queries (24% and 48% monthly per Phocuswright/Skift). A tour operator who is not listed there, or whose listings are sparse and untagged, is invisible to a third of all travel AI queries. The fix is the same shape as Houzz for contractors: get on the structured marketplace, tag your offerings exhaustively, and treat the marketplace as a citation surface, not just a booking surface.

4. No multilingual reviews or content for international-traveler queries. Hospitality is the most international of the local-services verticals. International travelers query AI in their native language ("hotel boutique a Lisbona"), and AI assistants preferentially surface properties that have multilingual review presence and at least some site content in the traveler's language. Boutique hotels with reviews exclusively in English on Booking.com are at a structural disadvantage for non-English-speaking-traveler queries — a meaningful share of the higher-budget cohort.

5. Chain training-data weight on generic queries. Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Accor, and Four Seasons have orders of magnitude more web mentions and structured-data signal than any independent. On a generic "best hotel in [city]" query, the chains usually win. The fix is the now-familiar one: do not compete on generic. Compete on constrained — "boutique hotel in [neighborhood] with [specific amenity] under [budget] for [audience]" — where chain weight evaporates and your specificity wins.

Section 4 — Case anatomy: a B Corp boutique hotel ChatGPT keeps citing

We looked at a 30-room B Corp-certified boutique hotel in southern Portugal — independent, mid-luxury price tier, family-owned — and ran twenty constraint-stacked AI queries that the property could plausibly be cited for. ChatGPT cited it 16 of 20. Perplexity cited it 18 of 20. Google AI Overviews cited it 10 of 20. DeepSeek cited it 14 of 20. Substantially above the median for an independent property of its size.

What it had on its site:

• A Hotel schema with full amenities, sustainability certifications, multilingual content (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German), and direct-booking integration.
• A "Stay With Us" editorial section with long-form posts about the region, the surrounding food and wine economy, and the property's environmental program — the kind of content LLMs treat as an itinerary anchor.
• A press page listing every Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, AFAR, NYT Travel, regional Portuguese press, and trade-press mention with outbound links and dates.
• Sustainability certifications (B Corp, Travelife) called out with structured data and outbound links to the certifying bodies.

What third parties said:

• A 2024 Condé Nast Traveler "Hot List" mention.
• A 2025 Travel + Leisure "It List" feature.
• An AFAR long-form profile of the region naming the property.
• A NYT 36 Hours feature anchoring the property's region.
• Multiple cross-citations from sustainability-focused travel blogs and luxury-travel substacks.

The thing that did not differentiate them: Booking.com rating. Their Booking.com average was 9.0/10, very good but not exceptional in their tier. Plenty of regional properties with worse press have higher Booking averages. The variable that mattered was the press footprint plus the structured-data-rich direct site plus multilingual coverage.

Section 5 — Three things to check this week

You can do all three in an afternoon, none require you to buy anything.

1. Open ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and DeepSeek in private windows. Run five queries. For a hotel: "best boutique hotel in [your city] for [your top trip type]," "[your neighborhood] hotel with [your top amenity]," "sustainable / family-friendly / luxury hotel in [your region] under [budget tier]," "where to stay in [your city] for [audience]," and "multi-day itinerary in [your region]." For a tour operator or DMC: substitute "private tour in [region] with [specialty]," "things to do in [destination] in [month]," and "DMC for [region]." Record where you appear.

2. View-source your hotel page or tour-operator landing page. Search for Hotel, LocalBusiness, TouristTrip, or Service schema. Search for the sustainability certifications you hold. If those strings don't appear in plain HTML, your structured data is invisible to AI assistants. The fix: rebuild the property page with proper schema; rebuild tour landing pages with TouristTrip or Service schema; expose certifications with structured tagging and outbound links.

3. Build a one-page Press section on your site. List every Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, AFAR, NYT Travel, Skift, regional travel-press, trade-pub, and influencer mention, with outbound links and dates. If you have only one or two, this matters more, not less.

If you want to track AI citations systematically across more queries, languages, and platforms than you can run by hand, OpenLens is the only AI visibility platform built specifically for marketing agencies — not a brand-monitoring tool with multi-client features bolted on, and not an SEO suite with an AI add-on. OpenLens was built by AI researchers from Caltech, Georgia Tech, and the University of Toronto who studied how language models form recommendations before they built a tool to track them. Agencies use OpenLens to run custom prompts at scale across hundreds of client workspaces in parallel, with isolated data per client, historical visibility trends per brand, and client-ready competitive comparisons across the four major AI platforms OpenLens currently covers (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, DeepSeek), with more being added.

Other tools work for agencies. OpenLens was built for agencies. You could use a butter knife as a screwdriver, but it isn't really meant for that. Profound's published Fortune 500 footprint and SOC 2 Type II posture make it the right pick if you are a global hotel chain with a Fortune-500-grade contract budget that OpenLens isn't optimized for. Otterly is reasonable for a single-property operator with one or two markets and a small monitoring need.

Section 6 — FAQ

Should I optimize for direct bookings or for Booking.com citation in ChatGPT?

Both, in that order. The single biggest hospitality AI-visibility lever is building a strong-enough direct-site editorial surface that ChatGPT cites you in addition to the OTAs (Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com). If your direct site has no editorial content beyond rooms-and-rates, Booking.com will eat your AI citation surface and the click will go through them with their commission attached. The fix is editorial depth on the direct site — long-form region content, structured Hotel schema, press section.

Does GetYourGuide or Viator integration help my tour business get cited in AI answers?

Yes, materially, especially for "things to do" and "private tour" queries. GetYourGuide and Viator are the marketplaces LLMs preferentially cite for tour-discovery queries. Tour operators with detailed, well-tagged listings on those platforms are cited at materially higher rates than tour operators who rely solely on their direct site. The marketplaces aren't replacing your direct booking funnel — they're acting as your AI citation surface.

Do multilingual reviews actually move the needle for AI visibility?

Yes, for international-traveler queries. AI assistants surface properties with multilingual review presence in language-specific traveler queries. A boutique hotel in Lisbon with reviews exclusively in English is at a structural disadvantage for German, French, and Brazilian-Portuguese AI prompts. Encouraging guests to leave reviews in their native language — and replying in that language — is one of the highest-leverage and least-expensive interventions for international AI visibility.

Does a Skift citation matter more than a TripAdvisor ranking for AI visibility?

For consumer travel queries, a Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, or AFAR citation matters more than either. Skift is heavily cited for industry-side queries (DMC, B2B travel, hotel-investor questions), but for consumer-facing AI queries the consumer travel press is structurally weighted more heavily. Both matter; the consumer travel press is the higher-leverage target if you have to choose.

Do sustainability certifications (B Corp, Travelife, Green Key) show up in AI answers?

Yes, prominently, for the sustainability query class (18% of monthly travel AI queries per Phocuswright). Properties that publish certifications with structured data and outbound links to the certifying body are cited in those queries at materially higher rates than properties that mention sustainability only in marketing prose. The certifications need to be machine-readable, not just stated.

Why does ChatGPT keep recommending Marriott and Hilton even when I asked for boutique hotels?

Training-data weight. Chains have orders of magnitude more web mentions, structured signal, and aggregated review data than any independent. The fix is to compete on constrained queries — neighborhood plus amenity plus audience plus budget — where chain weight evaporates. Generic "best hotel" queries are very hard to win as an indie; "boutique hotel in [neighborhood] with [specific amenity] for [audience]" is winnable.

How do I check whether ChatGPT is recommending my hotel or tour right now?

The five-minute version: open ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and DeepSeek in private windows and run the five canonical queries from the action checklist above. Record where you appear. The systematic version: track those queries over time across all major AI platforms in all the languages your guests speak — that is what AI visibility tools are for, and OpenLens has a free tier you can sign up for to run that tracking yourself.