The hotel industry has always valued direct bookings, but in the age of artificial intelligence, operators must be more strategic in attracting guests. As travelers increasingly turn to generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini for trip planning, hoteliers must understand how they appear in these searches to avoid missing out on booking opportunities.

To this end, Vancouver-based software company Operto launched GEO Consultant last month. According to the company, this new generative engine optimization tool is touted as the hotel industry's first free AI visibility tool, designed to give hotels direct insight into how they appear across various generative AI platforms.

Following the tool's release, Operto CEO Tim Major shared how hoteliers can leverage GEO Consultant to enhance their presence in AI-driven travel discovery, and why AI visibility is becoming a necessity for hotel success.

From SEO to GEO

Major explained that when it comes to search visibility, GEO is the new three-letter acronym hoteliers need to focus on. GEO ranks citations and mentions within AI-generated answers, while the more familiar SEO (search engine optimization) ranks websites in traditional search results.

Major said that as more travelers use conversational AI to research and compare accommodations, GEO capabilities are crucial for hotels. According to Operto data, 40% of travelers now use AI tools for trip planning and booking, while 70% of hotel bookings involve AI-driven recommendations.

In this shift, "hotels are already appearing in AI-generated travel recommendations," but "most hotels don't know how AI portrays them or what drives these results," Major said in a statement.

Major noted that if hotels don't gain insights and structure data for large language models, they will quickly fall behind competitors that do. He said that when search traffic substantially shifts to LLMs, those unprepared will miss out on direct booking opportunities.

A new type of tool

Operto's GEO Consultant provides hotels with a way to "understand what drives their visibility and take action with clear recommendations to improve their presence," Major said.

Using GEO Consultant, hotels can run a visibility scan of their website to assess their performance in AI-driven travel searches, based on specific prompts for which the hotel wants to be discovered. For example, if a hotel in Miami wants to be represented in generative AI searches for "oceanfront hotels in Miami," the visibility scan can determine how that hotel appears in that search query and identify gaps in direct booking opportunities.

Before this tool, hotels relied on general marketing tools or specialized consulting services for AI visibility, Operto detailed in a press release provided to Hotel Dive. While generic GEO tools exist, "they are mostly industry-agnostic and not designed specifically for hotel properties, limiting their ability to reflect how hotels are actually discovered in AI platforms," Operto said.

However, GEO Consultant provides hotels with insights compared against direct competitors. The tool also highlights whether visibility is driven by the hotel's own website or by third-party intermediaries like OTAs.

According to Operto, in addition to assessing a hotel's presence in generative AI searches, the system also provides hotels with practical recommendations to improve their performance.

Operto's Marketing Agent, another tool in the company's Distribution AI suite, takes these visibility insights a step further by identifying when OTAs "intercept high-intent searches" and where independent hotels lose direct bookings, according to the company website. Using this information, the agent can recommend and launch targeted paid campaigns aimed at improving direct booking performance, with an autonomy that Major described as "magic."