A colleague mentioned it last week as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world: he’d settled on the destination and accommodation for his September holiday, and ninety percent of the customer journey behind that decision had taken place in ChatGPT. Prompting, following up, prompting again, until he was left with a shortlist that matched exactly what his family was looking for.
More and more travellers are doing this. And it changes something fundamental about how visibility in travel works. Not at some point in the future, but right now.
The handover nobody predicted
What stands out in my colleague’s story isn’t that AI was used. We already knew AI usage in travel is growing. What stands out is where in the journey AI hands the baton back to the classic channels.
The route was simple:
- ChatGPT for a list of suitable hotels – the destination was already fixed.
- Google Search for the sharpest price – with the usual clicking around.
In other words: AI wins the orientation moment, but SEA and SEO still decide who lands the booking. That’s in line with what another colleague has been seeing: branded searches aren’t declining yet. That decline will only come once people actually start booking inside an LLM. And in most markets, that moment hasn’t arrived.
My own booking behaviour follows a familiar pattern too: AI for putting together an itinerary, but for the accommodation itself I still fall back on the trusted route via Booking.com, Trip.com and Klook (a real opportunity to win Asian guests in particular), or – surprisingly often – via Google Maps and the WhatsApp number listed with the property.
As soon as there’s a price difference or a commission to be saved, people still compare manually. So: Booking.com first for price and availability, then a branded search, then Google Maps or the Business Profile, and only after that – if it pays off – the property’s own (often dated) website.
The practical conclusion: AI has taken over the orientation moment. The classic channels – SEA, SEO, branded searches, OTAs, Google Business Profiles – are still fighting over the conversion. Both moments deserve attention, but not the same kind of attention.
Why “being in the AI shortlist” is the new “being on page 1”
To understand why this is more than a nice anecdote, it helps to know what technically happens the moment someone asks ChatGPT or Google AI Mode a travel question. A model breaks that single question (“best family holiday park Veluwe summer 2026”) down into roughly five to fifteen sub-queries, uses those to retrieve around a hundred pages, and ultimately selects only five to ten passages from them to build its answer.
That last part is the crucial detail: the selection happens at passage level, not page level. A sharply written paragraph on a smaller site can be cited ahead of a page from Booking.com or TripAdvisor.
That’s good news for most of our clients. Holiday parks, attractions, campsites and rental providers are rarely the biggest domains in their market, but they can deliver the sharpest, most concrete content. Visibility in travel is becoming less a question of domain authority and more a question of how citable your content is. We wrote about this earlier in Search is changing fast. Is your strategy keeping up?
This is also exactly why my colleague’s advice is so sound: test for yourself which answers an LLM gives your target audience, and check whether your brand appears in that top ten. If it doesn’t, that’s rarely a coincidence. It means there is no passage anywhere on the web that is sharp enough, factual enough or authoritative enough to be cited.
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What it costs not to be in the shortlist
For the hotels and properties that fell outside the ChatGPT shortlist in our colleague’s story, the consequence was immediate and unforgiving: no chance, no booking, no second thought. The traveller simply never saw them.
That’s the scenario everyone in this industry now has to reckon with. Including brands that don’t have an active SEO strategy.
The research our GEO framework is built on shows how fast this is moving: AI-referred traffic to commercial sites grew eight times faster last year than the year before, and AI-referred orders grew fifteen times faster. Fifteen percent of travellers used generative AI to plan a trip in 2025, up from ten percent a year earlier – growth of roughly 64 percent year on year.
Other sources point the same way. Adobe Analytics saw AI-referred traffic to travel and hospitality sites rise by hundreds of percent in 2025, and Phocuswright reports that the classic search engine is losing ground precisely in that orientation phase. This is no longer niche behaviour.
What you can do today
The advice we and our colleagues have already been giving each other is, at its core, exactly right: start with testing, not with technology.
- Prompt as if you were your target audience. Ask the question your ideal guest would ask, in the words that guest would use. Not in the top ten? Keep digging: why not, who is in there, and what do those pages have that your site is missing?
- Build content a model can cite, not just read. That means self-contained, factual paragraphs with concrete figures, real reviews, guest stories and clear answers to frequently asked questions. The four pillars our Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) work rests on: content architecture, entity consensus (being present on the platforms a model weighs, from industry sites to Reddit), fact density at passage level, and monthly citation tracking to see whether it’s working.
- Don’t neglect the conversion side. The AI shortlist wins the orientation moment, but SEA, SEO and a well-maintained Google Business Profile still decide who lands the booking – especially while branded searches aren’t yet declining. Make sure your WhatsApp number is correct in Google Maps, that your own website is at least competitive with the OTA price, and that you’re listed on the right Asian platforms if that market matters to you.
- Involve the content team, even if you’re not an SEO client. GEO isn’t a separate channel sitting next to SEO. To a large extent it’s the same content, reorganised for a different kind of reader. That conversation doesn’t belong only to the search specialists, but to everyone who creates content for a brand.
- Take advertising seriously, but keep building on organic. Advertising on ChatGPT has been available in the Netherlands since August 2026, including self-service through Ads Manager. Ads only appear to users on the free and Go plans, clearly labelled and separate from the answer itself. It’s still early: results are unproven, and a mismatch between an ad and the user’s question is likely to feel even more irritating in an AI conversation than in a classic search engine. Organic visibility remains the foundation, and early test campaigns are mostly valuable for learning what intent your audience actually expresses in an LLM. Whoever doesn’t test now will fall behind twice: first on citations, then on ad placements.
The practical summary
AI hasn’t taken over the entire customer journey. It has taken over the first part of it – and that part decides who is even still in the running for the second part. Travellers let ChatGPT or Gemini hand them a shortlist and then, just as they always have, head to Google, to the OTA, to the property’s own website or to the WhatsApp number on Google Maps to book.
If you’re not visible in that first step, you never make it to the second. Visibility in travel no longer begins on page 1 of Google, but in the answer of a language model.
Want to know whether your brand already shows up in the answers ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity give for your most important search intents? That’s exactly what our GEO Scan was built for.
