PARIS — With people increasingly adopting AI to help plan their vacations, hotels are working to make sure that you check them out — and check in.

Whether using ChatGPT or AI-enabled travel sites like Layla.ai, it is already possible to pose search questions like: “Calm hotel with west-facing balcony” or “Charming hotel with spa that accepts dogs”.

This simple switch to plain speech searches belies major technical changes that mean hotels have to learn to become visible to AI models.

“We’re in complete upheaval: last year 35 per cent of French people used artificial intelligence to find a hotel, a cafe or a restaurant,” said Nicolas Marette, founder of Custplace, a French company that helps firms optimise their digital presence.

According to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), around 37 per cent of travellers are already using AI-enabled online travel sites to plan and book trips.

Hospitality industry players have taken notice.

A quarter of hospitality firms “have an AI strategy that is starting to produce real returns across multiple organisational activities”, according to the BCG report.

“What a hotel needs to do to get well referenced by search engines is not the same thing that they need to do to get referenced by artificial intelligence,” said Johanna Benesty at BCG.

Moreover, not all AI models “work in the same way,” she added.