AI Is the New Front Door to Your Hotel
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.
Tom Underwood, COO and co-founder of Bonafide.AI, described this shift when Visiting Media CEO Jascha Kaykas-Wolff sat down with him for a webinar on how AI is changing hotel discovery.
56% of U.S. travelers used AI to plan a trip last year, double 2024. Among meeting planners, it's 91%, and venue sourcing is one of the top use cases. The shift has already happened, and most hotels haven't caught up.
Discovery is no longer a search bar. It's a conversation, and the AI narrows the list before a human gets involved. If your property isn't in that first answer, you weren't in the running.
The uncomfortable part
One in three AI answers about a hotel today contains a factual error. Tom qualified this: it applies to 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 or room configuration, and accuracy drops fast.
Hotels have spent two decades optimizing photos and copy for humans. A pool icon tells a person what they need. The AI answering that same question needs pool hours and water temperature. Most of that detail is sitting in a system that wasn't built to surface it, or it isn't written down at all.
Images are data now. An AI reads them to answer the specific, precise questions guests have. Properties without structured visual content get misdescribed, at scale, to buyers who won't call to verify.
Why this isn't a "someday" problem
"If you're waiting, you're not learning." Tom described a hotel in Hong Kong with genuinely excellent limo service. It was the kind of detail that wins bookings, and it was completely invisible to AI models. Nobody researching that property through AI would ever find out about it.
We've watched this before. Hotels that took SEO seriously in 2003 still own organic search today. Hotels that treated OTA distribution as someone else's problem now pay billions annually in commissions. The AI layer is the same window, and it's open now. The OTAs are already investing at scale. They don't have your property's ground truth.
Accuracy improvements from aligning your data show up in weeks. It's a concrete problem with a measurable fix.
What we're doing about it
This is 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 already in your Visiting Media platform, including tours and structured visual data, is what these systems need to answer correctly. We built the part that's genuinely hard in hospitality: accurate, property-level content, surfaced to the systems doing the recommending.
Visiting Media and Bonafide.AI can show you where your property stands and what to fix first, before a competitor gets there.
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Watch the full conversation between Jascha Kaykas-Wolff and Tom Underwood