Hotel branding in 2026: Someone else writes your pitch

A hotel's brand is moving from the sentence the hotel writes to a pitch rewritten for every traveler out of guest reviews, so the stay is now judged against a promise the hotel never made

by Markus Busch

On September 30, Airbnb started putting its own description of each property into its search results, next to the host's photos and title. Four weeks later, Hotels.com began writing comparisons of shortlisted hotels for each traveler, built around whatever that traveler says matters most.

For as long as there have been booking sites, the sentence that described a hotel came from the hotel. The description in the extranet, the line on the website, the brochure before that. The guest read it, booked, and checked it at the door.

That sentence now has another author.

Airbnb writes its own description of your property

Airbnb calls them AI-powered listing descriptions. They sit in search results and pick out what Airbnb considers a property's key features. A second tool, Compare, lines up the places a traveler has saved and gives each one a short summary of what stands out, beside the price and a few highlights from reviews. Airbnb says the summaries draw on two things: reviews, and the details hosts provide.

The reviews had already moved up the page. In May, Airbnb began pulling recurring themes out of a listing's whole review history and showing them near the top. It has more than a billion reviews to pull from. The same release added boutique hotels in 20 cities.

What Airbnb has not said is whether the new descriptions run on hotel listings, or whether a hotel or host can see the line before a guest does, let alone change it. The rollout started in the US.

Hotels.com writes a different pitch for every traveler

Hotels.com goes a step further. Its AI Compare, announced in late October, produces what the company calls "personalized, plain language comparisons based on expressed interests," such as location, amenities, price and policies, and the traveler can keep asking follow-up questions. A second tool, Property Expert, answers questions about a single hotel on Expedia and Hotels.com, working from the property details, the guest reviews and her own reservation. Both run in the US for now.

Google's AI Mode does the same job in search. The traveler describes the trip, and it returns a list of hotels with guest reviews and the factors worth comparing.

Read "based on expressed interests" twice. The guest who mentioned her car gets your hotel compared on the garage. The couple who mentioned a quiet weekend gets it compared on the rooms at the back. Same hotel. Two pitches. You wrote neither, and you will read neither.

A hotel's positioning used to be one sentence, chosen with care and repeated everywhere. It is now as many sentences as there are travelers asking.

The guest's review is written against the platform's sentence

A guest judges a stay against what she expected, and she expected what she was told. More and more often, what she was told is the platform's line: the quiet courtyard rooms, the ten-minute walk to the old town, the breakfast every reviewer mentions.

So that is what her review measures. If the comparison sold her quiet and her room faced the tram stop, the review says so. If it sold her the breakfast and the breakfast was good, the review says the breakfast was good. Again.

Then the review goes back in. Airbnb names reviews as an input to its summaries, and Expedia grounds Property Expert in them. The next traveler's pitch is built partly from what the last guest wrote about the last pitch.

That loop is where a hotel's brand now lives, and it is slow to turn. A hotel that renovated, replaced its restaurant or went after couples instead of business travelers can rewrite every line on its own website. The summary keeps reading the people who stayed before the change. Your website says what you want to be. The loop repeats what you were.

An independent hotel feels this most. A chain's name tells the traveler the tier, the room and the rate before any summary is written. An independent is known by what its guests wrote, so the summary is the whole introduction.

We have written before about what happens when the facts in an AI answer go stale and the front desk breaks the news. This sits one level above that. Every fact can be right and the pitch can still belong to someone else.

Booking.com still hasn't shipped its version

The largest hotel platform is the one holding back. Booking.com announced review summaries in October 2024 as a test, built so a traveler could get the key points about a property without scrolling through its reviews. It has not confirmed them for hotel pages since. This year it shipped AI review summaries for car rental companies.

So on Booking.com, for now, a guest still reads your description and other guests' reviews directly. That gives you time.

Use some of it on Monday. Ask the comparison yourself: on Hotels.com if your guests book from the US, in ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode if they don't. Name your hotel and two hotels you lose bookings to, and ask which suits a couple wanting a quiet weekend, then a family, then someone in town for meetings. Those are the guests you think you sell to. Set each answer beside the one sentence you would write about your hotel yourself.

Where the two match, the record is doing its job. Where they don't, the gap will not close from your website. It closes in what the next hundred guests write, and that depends on what they find when they walk in.

Read also: AI is confidently wrong about your hotel, and the guest arrives believing it · The OTA is writing your AI profile. You set it and forgot it. · The audience for your guest reviews is no longer a guest

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