One of the most interesting comparisons between Destination AI 2025 and 2026 was hearing from the major hotel brands again.
Last year, my takeaway was that every brand was experimenting, but nobody had solved the fragmentation puzzle…or was particularly willing to show their cards.
A year later, those priorities haven’t necessarily disappeared. But they’ve matured significantly.
The conversation has shifted from “What could we do with AI?” to “How do we operationalize this at scale?”
IHG: From Experimenting to Measuring AI Visibility
2025: IHG talked about experimentation, including robotics in China and the challenges of deploying those technologies at scale in the United States.
2026: The marketing use case is much more tangible. IHG is now measuring AI search visibility at the individual hotel level. Approximately 30 custom prompts per hotel are run across multiple AI engines, with properties receiving red, yellow or green visibility scores. Gaps can then be connected to specific content recommendations.
IHG also has conversational search, agentic service booking and a ChatGPT presence live. Its new hotel-content platform is designed to capture much more granular information about individual properties, not simply “romantic,” for example, but specific attributes such as couples’ spas or private plunge pools.
Hilton: From Cleaning the Data to Using It
2025: Hilton’s message centered heavily on the need for clean, standardized data and a common language that would prevent semantic confusion across hotel systems.
2026: Hilton appears to have moved well beyond the foundation stage. Its strategy now centers on three areas: distribution, guest experience and enterprise acceleration. Hilton described itself as having moved out of “pilot purgatory.”
The company has launched an AI planner combining property content with destination information across its website, mobile app and ChatGPT experience. According to Hilton, bookings through these experiences are converting a few points higher. Its messaging bot is also handling 40–45% of incoming guest messages.
Marriott: From Guest Conversations to AI-Powered Trip Planning
2025: Marriott seemed almost obsessed with guest conversations across the entire journey.
2026: That focus remains, but now there are actual consumer-facing products behind it. Marriott said Homes & Villas has served as its AI-search testing ground for roughly two and a half years. After focusing on foundations and governance last year, the company is now working with a guest-facing trip-planning assistant, Google AI Mode direct booking and a ChatGPT app.
Hyatt: From Individual Use Cases to Workflow Redesign
2025: Hyatt discussed relatively specific applications such as lead scoring and responding to RFPs while trying to balance AI speed with governance and safety.
2026: The conversation has become broader. Hyatt described moving from adoption to “absorption” and not whether employees have access to AI, but whether they’re actually extracting value from it.
The next step is redesigning entire workflows around agentic technology while maintaining rigor around where the resulting savings or revenue actually appear on the P&L.
Wyndham: From Cost Reduction to Commercial Intelligence
2025: Wyndham’s AI discussion was heavily focused on reducing costs, particularly through call-center efficiencies and IoT.
2026: Wyndham is still very owner-focused, but AI has expanded into the commercial organization. After building its data foundation over four years, Wyndham spent 10 months piloting an LLM-based commercial platform spanning revenue management, marketing and sales. It is already being used by 115 revenue managers. Some properties are also using AI to answer every phone call while surfacing guest history.
Choice: From More Data to Making the Data Usable by AI
2025: Choice talked about incorporating new data points into its existing business-intelligence environment.
2026: The strategy is considerably more sophisticated: a data catalog, semantic layer, knowledge graphs, unstructured data and MCP servers designed to create a single governed door through which AI agents can access information.
But one of Choice’s most interesting results was much simpler. Basic content updates reportedly produced about a 3% increase in direct RevPAR versus a control group, with greater gains at hotels delivering stronger guest experiences.
From Experiments to Infrastructure
Looking across the six brands, the year-over-year progression is striking.
The brands haven’t solved AI. In fact, many of the same underlying challenges around data, governance, fragmentation and ROI remain.
But they’ve clearly moved forward.
And perhaps the biggest change for hotel marketers is that AI is no longer confined to an innovation or IT conversation. It’s moving directly into search, content, reputation, distribution, revenue management and the booking journey.
That makes what happens next increasingly relevant at the individual hotel level, not just at brand headquarters.