Amadeus starts selling hotels their visibility in AI search
The company that runs much of hotels' distribution is now charging them to be found by the agents — visibility shifts from an organic given to a purchased product
When a traveler asks an AI assistant where to stay, a hotel either appears in the answer or it doesn't, and there is no second page to scroll to. Amadeus is now selling hotels a way to influence that answer. At HITEC it introduced Performance Manager – AI Search, a tool that helps hotels structure their content so AI systems read and recommend them. For hotels, it marks a shift: being found in AI search is becoming something you buy, sold by the company that already runs much of your distribution.
Driving the news. Performance Manager – AI Search is the discovery piece of a wider hospitality push Amadeus calls AI Commerce. It helps hotels format rates, content, and property detail for generative results — the foundation of what the industry has begun calling generative engine optimization. Amadeus pairs it with an AI Booking Assistant embedded in its Website Solutions and the iHotelier booking engine, bringing conversational booking to hotel-owned channels, with general availability targeted for year-end. The discovery tool is the part already in hotels' hands.
The figure Amadeus leads with: in early pilots, 44.7% of AI-driven visitors reached the booking engine, against 25.9% from organic search — a claim drawn from the company's own pilot data, not independent measurement. Read with that caveat, it still points somewhere specific. Traffic arriving from AI assistants converts toward booking at a markedly higher rate than ordinary search traffic, which is exactly why visibility in that channel is worth paying for.
The turn. Amadeus spent this same week positioning to be the rail that AI agents book through. Now it is also selling hotels the tool to be picked by those agents in the first place. That is revenue on both sides of the conversation — the company that carries the booking also charges for the discoverability that feeds it. A hotel's presence in AI search, until now an unowned and largely unmeasured thing, becomes a product with a price and a vendor.
What it means for hotels. Discoverability is moving from something a property earned through its own content and reputation to something it procures. For hotels already inside the Amadeus stack, that is one more line on the bill and one more dependency. For those outside it, the question sharpens: as AI assistants become a real path to the booking engine, being absent from that path is no longer a missed marketing opportunity. It is lost demand, and the fix is now sold rather than free.
Read also: Amadeus wants to be the middleman AI agents were meant to remove
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