A traveler doesn't type "best hotel in San Francisco" anymore. They ask for a room near Fisherman's Wharf that fits their family of four, with a view of the Bay, five minutes' walk from BART. The AI narrows the list before they ever open a search engine or land on a booking channel.
That's not a hypothetical. That's what Tom Underwood, COO and co-founder of Bonafide.AI, described when Visiting Media CEO Jascha Kaykas-Wolff sat down with him for a webinar on how AI is changing hotel discovery.
Here's the number that should stop you: 56% of U.S. travelers used AI to plan a trip in the last year. That's double 2024. Among meeting planners, it's 91%, and venue sourcing is one of the top use cases. This isn't a shift that's coming. It already happened, and most hotels haven't caught up to it.
We talk about "discovery" like it's still a search bar. It isn't. It's a conversation, and the AI is doing the narrowing before a human ever gets involved. If your property isn't in that first answer, you were never in the running. Not deprioritized. Not on page two. Just absent.
The uncomfortable part
One in three AI answers about a hotel today contains a factual error. Tom was careful to qualify this — it's one in three among the detailed questions, not the basic ones. Ask an AI if a hotel has a pool, it usually gets that right. Ask about pet policy specifics, whether the windows actually open, or the bathroom door configuration, and the answers get shakier fast.
The reason is almost mundane. Hotels have spent two decades optimizing photos and copy for humans. A pool icon and a great photo tell a person everything they need. But the AI answering your guest's question isn't looking for a great photo. It's looking for the pool hours and the morning water temperature. Machines need granular, structured information, and most of that information is sitting in a system nobody built for this — or it isn't written down anywhere at all.
Images have quietly become something they weren't when they were shot. They're not just marketing anymore. They're data — the raw material an AI reads to answer a specific, oddly precise question a guest actually has. The properties that treat their visual content that way are the ones showing up correctly. The ones that don't are getting misdescribed, at scale, to buyers who will never call to check.
Why this isn't a "someday" problem
"If you're waiting, you're not learning." Tom told a story about a hotel in Hong Kong with genuinely excellent limo service — the kind of detail that wins a booking — that was completely invisible to the AI models. Nobody researching that hotel through AI would ever find out about it. That's not a slow leak. That's discovery you don't get back.
We've watched this movie before. Jascha mentioned hotels that took SEO seriously in 2003 still own organic search today, twenty years later. Hotels that treated OTA distribution as someone else's problem now hand over billions in commissions every year to have that problem solved for them. The AI layer is the same window, opening right now, and the OTAs already know it. They're investing heavily, because they have the scale to move fast. What they don't have is your property's ground truth. That part only you can supply.
The good news: accuracy improvements from aligning your data are measurable in weeks, not years. That's a rare thing in this industry — a problem you can actually put a number on, fix, and re-measure.
What we're doing about it
This is exactly the gap our partnership with Bonafide.AI is built to close. Hotels shouldn't have to hope an AI agent gets their property right. The content and context already living in your Visiting Media platform — the tours, the smart tagging detail, the structured data behind your visuals — is exactly what these systems need to answer correctly. We didn't build the AI layer. We built the part underneath it that's genuinely hard in hospitality: rich, accurate, property-level content, made available to the systems now doing the recommending.
If you want to see where your own property stands, Visiting Media and Bonafide.AI can show you what AI is currently getting right about your property, what it's getting wrong, and what to fix first — before a competitor figures this out ahead of you.
The window is open. It won't stay that way indefinitely.
Watch the full conversation between Jascha Kaykas-Wolff and Tom Underwood