Getting your hotel or inn recommended when travellers ask AI where to stay

Travellers are changing how they plan a trip. Instead of searching, opening ten tabs, and comparing, many now ask an AI tool where to stay and read the answer it gives them.

In October 2026, a Leger surveyfound that 22% of Canadians had already used AI tools to plan, book, or manage leisure travel, more than double the share in spring 2025.

This is not only happening in chatbots. Google has shown AI Overviews in Canadasince fall 2024, putting AI-written answers above the regular results, and ChatGPT has offered web searchto everyone since early 2025.

In an earlier guide, Writing content that people can read and that AI can read too, I covered the content habits that help any website: writing the way people ask, genuine FAQs, clear structure, and keeping your details accurate. If you are new to this, start there.

This guide goes further for hotels, inns, and lodges, where rooms, rates, policies, and booking paths add real complexity, and getting them wrong in an AI answer costs bookings.

Two questions every traveller asks

When someone plans a stay with an AI tool, the conversation often comes down to two questions.

First: where should we stay? A romantic weekend in the mountains, a pet-friendly cabin, somewhere quiet two hours from the city. The AI builds a shortlist.

Second: is this place right for us? Does it allow dogs, is breakfast included, can we check in late, what does the package actually include. The AI looks for specific answers about each property on the list.

Independent properties can do well at both, but right now they start behind. In a Lighthouse study of 4,545 ChatGPT prompts, AI hotel mentions were concentrated among a small group of properties, mostly chains and upscale hotels. Most of the information AI drew on came from booking sites and travel media, not hotel websites.

[Independent hotels] may not have the same brand recognition as global chains, but they can improve their digital signals with clearer, more complete, and more consistent content. — AltexSoft, reporting on the Lighthouse study

That is where your own website matters most. When a traveller asks is this place right for us?, the AI looks for specific answers: pet policies, room types, what a package includes. Nobody knows those details better than you do, and the clearer they are on your site, the easier it is for AI to recommend you.

Start with one plain sentence about who your property suits best. AI needs to understand who a hotel is best for, what kind of stay it offers, and what makes choosing it easy. When those answers are spread across several pages, or worded differently on each one, AI is less likely to recommend the hotel, and nothing on your end tells you why.

A line like “A quiet lodge for couples who want to hike by day and soak by night” near the top of your homepage answers that before a traveller has to ask.

The facts AI tools look for

AI tools compare places by their details. If a detail is missing, vague, or buried in a PDF or image, the tool may guess, or fill the gap from a booking site or review that may be out of date.

Make sure your own website clearly answers:

• Check-in and check-out times, and whether early or late is possible
• Room and bed types, and how many guests each room sleeps
• Pet policy, including fees and any limits
• Parking, including EV charging if you have it
• Breakfast and dining: included, available, or nearby
• Accessibility: what is and is not accessible
• Cancellation and deposit terms
• Minimum stays and seasonal differences

Put each answer where a guest would expect to find it, in plain sentences.

A short FAQon each room or policy page works well. “Yes, dogs are welcome in two of our cabins, with a $25 per night fee” is easy for a person to read and easy for an AI to repeat correctly.

Two small details help. Give each FAQ a descriptive heading, such as “Questions about bringing your dog,” rather than a bare “FAQ.” And show a visible “last updated” date on your policy pages. In HubSpot’s 2026 research on AI citations, both were linked to pages being cited more often, and the last-updated date mattered more than the original publish date. It also tells a guest that the pet policy they are reading is current.

Describe your photos too. A short description behind each image, called alt text, like “Two-bedroom cabin with a wood stove and lake view,” tells AI tools what is in the picture, which “IMG_4021” never will. It also helps guests who use screen readers. And if a key detail like your rates or pet policy only appears inside an image or PDF, repeat it on the page in plain text.

Describe your packages so they can be compared

Packages are an easy place to lose an AI recommendation without knowing it. A package called “Mountain Escape” with a photo and a booking button tells a traveller very little, and tells an AI even less. In a Lighthouse study of ChatGPT hotel recommendations, the words hotels used to describe themselves shaped which travellers the AI sent their way.

For each package, state:

• Who it is for: couples, families, hikers, a winter weekend
• What is included: nights, meals, activities, extras
• How it is priced: per night, per stay, or as an add-on
• Where and when: the region, and any seasonal dates

When a traveller asks “what romantic packages are there near Canmore with dinner included?”, a package that answers each of those plainly gives the AI something to match. One that does not is easy to leave out.

Make every listing tell the same story

Your website is not the only place AI tools read about you. They also see your Google Business Profile, booking sites, tourism directories, and reviews.

When those sources disagree, a different phone number, an old room type, a pet policy that changed last year, the AI has to choose which one to believe. Sometimes it chooses wrong, and a guest arrives expecting something you no longer offer.

A few habits help:

• Keep your name, address, phone, and website identical everywhere, what is called NAP consistency.
• Update your Google Business Profile with current photos, seasonal dates, and amenities.
• Put a few short videos on YouTube: a room tour, the walk in from the parking lot, the trail out back in October. Ahrefs found YouTube is the most-cited site in Google AI Overviews, and a video that matches your website gives AI one more source telling the same story.
• Encourage happy guests to leave reviews, and reply to any that mention a policy or amenity. In a 2026 study, AI assistants choosing between similar hotels strongly favoured the one with the top guest rating. A short reply also lets you correct an outdated detail, like a pet policy that has changed, for every future guest who reads that review.
• When something changes, update your website first, then your listings.

If you are part of a group or association

Many independent properties belong to a regional association, a marketing collection, or a group of inns. That group website and your own site do different jobs.

The group site helps travellers answer where should we stay? It covers a region, a theme, or a type of stay, and it can show up for broad questions no single property could answer alone.

Your own site helps answer is this place right for me? It holds the details only you can keep accurate.

The two work best when they agree. Use the same words to describe your features as the group site does, such as pet friendly, spa, private cabins, or backcountry. Link to the group site, and make sure the group site’s description of your property matches your own.

A few technical checks for your web provider

You do not need to do these yourself, but they are worth asking about:

• Structured data. Hotel and offer structured datalabels your property type, amenities, and packages for search engines and AI. If your FAQs sit on your room or policy pages rather than a separate FAQ page, they can be labelled too, with no change to how the page looks. Google no longer shows FAQ rich resultsfor most sites, so keep your FAQs as visible content first.
• Content in the page itself. Most AI crawlers do not run scripts. They read the page as it first arrives. If your room details or rates only appear after the page loads, some tools may not see them.
• Crawler settings. Some sites block AI crawlers without meaning to. Cloudflare, for example, now blocks AI crawlers by default for new sitesunless the site owner allows them. If you want to be recommended, make sure reputable ones are allowed.
• Booking engine pages. Check whether your key details live only inside a third-party booking engine. If so, repeat the important ones on your own pages.

Once they arrive, make booking easy

Being recommended is half the job. AI tools send fewer visitors to hotel websites than search used to, and the ones who do arrive have often already narrowed their choice. Before spending more on traffic, check the path from landing page to booking. Two checks fit almost any property:

• Help guests choose quickly. A “best for” label on each room type, like “best for families” or “best for a quiet work trip,” plus one line on how it differs from the others, saves guests from doing homework.
• Show fees and policies early. Pet fees, resort fees, and cancellation terms that only appear at the last step make guests hesitate, or leave.

How to tell if it is working

Measuring AI visibility is still new, and no tool gives a complete picture. A practical approach:

• Look for visits from AI assistants in your analytics, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, or Gemini. Some AI visits show up as direct traffic, so treat these numbers as a minimum.

• Watch impressions in Google Search Console, not just clicks. Pew Research foundthat people click a regular result about half as often when an AI summary appears.

• Check Search Console’s generative AI performance report, which shows how often your pages appear in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.

• A few times a season, ask AI tools the questions your guests would ask, and note whether you appear and whether the details are right. Christine Malfair shared a useful prompt for this in her Bookings Boostnewsletter, because it asks the AI to admit what it does not know instead of guessing:

  Using only publicly available information you are confident about, explain why a guest would choose to stay at [Hotel Name]. If something is unclear or missing, say “not clear” rather than guessing or filling in gaps. Then rate the hotel on clarity (1–10) for each of the following: 1) Who is the hotel best suited for? 2) What kind of stay does it offer? 3) What makes choosing it feel obvious and easy? Briefly explain each rating.

  Any answer of “not clear” points to the page that needs work first.

• Ask guests how they found you, and add “an AI assistant” as an option.

Look for trends over months, not exact numbers week to week.

Small, steady, and specific

None of this requires a new website. Most of it is the kind of work you already do when a guest emails a question: answering clearly and keeping your details current.

The difference is that the answer now gets read by more than one guest. An AI tool may repeat it to hundreds of travellers who never reach your site to double-check. Getting it right once, in the right place, does a lot of quiet work.

Here is the whole guide in one place:

If you would like a second set of eyes on how your property reads, to guests and to AI, let’s look at it together. No pitch, no pressure. If you would rather start with a concrete review, a website auditcovers exactly this.

Several ideas in this guide were shaped by Christine Malfair’s Bookings Boost, a newsletter from Malfair Marketing written for independent hoteliers. Christine and I work together on several hotel websites. If you want to go deeper, her articles on what guests are really trying to achieve, what to measure when traffic drops, and getting more bookings from the traffic you already haveare good next reads.

For the general content habits behind this guide, read “Writing content that people can read and that AI can read too”.

If your site looks fine but bookings are quiet, “Why your website looks fine but is not bringing inquiries” is a good next step.