Act faster, rank higher, still book on the OTA

SiteMinder's CEO says hotels must execute faster to be bookable in the AI era. They can — and the booking still completes on the OTA by default.

SiteMinder's chief executive, Sankar Narayan, published a piece in the Hotel Yearbook with a clean argument. Connectivity is solved. What's left is execution. Once AI demand moves at machine speed, a hotel can't keep its rates and availability current by hand. It has to act as fast as the demand hitting it, to stay present and bookable wherever travelers now look.

He has the evidence. In SiteMinder's own survey of 700 hoteliers, 45 percent spot a revenue opportunity every week they can't act on in time, and 79 percent lose more than eleven hours a week to manual work between systems. That is a real cost. A hotel that opens a channel in a day instead of three weeks, or moves a rate the moment demand turns, keeps money it was leaving on the table. The speed argument holds.

And SiteMinder didn't stop at the argument. It built the path. Through its AI connector, a hotel now shows up inside ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with live rates and a link straight to its own booking engine — the guest books direct, no OTA commission. So this isn't a vendor selling speed it can't deliver. Faster, fresher, and genuinely able to book direct through an assistant.

The whole case rests on one word. Bookable.

It means two different things, and the piece lets them blur. One is being found — shown to the traveler, current and correct, the moment the agent asks. The other is being paid — the booking landing in your account. Speed buys the first. It does nothing for the second.

Here's why. SiteMinder's direct path is real, but it only fires when the traveler switches it on — turns on your hotel's app inside the assistant. Most won't. They'll ask the assistant a normal question and take the default answer, and the default is a generic search that builds its list from OTA data and sends the booking the way it always goes. So your rates are live, your content is rich, the agent finds you in a second and shows you perfectly — and then closes the sale on Booking, because that's the path it falls back to. You executed flawlessly. You ranked higher. The commission still got paid.

That's the gap under the word. Being found is what speed earns you. Being paid is decided one step later, by which path the traveler is on — and the path that pays you direct is the one the default never offers.

None of this makes Narayan wrong about speed. A hotel does have to move at the pace of AI demand, or it won't be shown at all. Speed is the price of being found. It just isn't the thing that decides who gets the booking.

There's an incentive worth naming, lightly. Ask any platform what the AI era needs and the answer comes back as more of what the platform sells — here, faster execution. Not because the reading is wrong, but because every vendor reads a shift as a reason to run harder on its own layer.

So the honest version is narrower than "speed is the new advantage." As long as the agent's fallback closes on the OTA, the hotel that executes fastest mostly wins a cleaner listing inside someone else's shop. The day the direct path becomes the default instead of the request, speed starts paying the hotel. Until then, faster keeps you visible, and the booking goes where the default sends it.

by Markus Busch, Editor and Publisher of Hospitality.today

Read also: Hotels are building the AI discovery layer. OTAs are harvesting it. / SiteMinder's second act

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