Loyalty programs may be the one asset agents can't take

The one asset a booking platform can't quietly take over is the one chains have been building, largely by accident, since before anyone said the word "agent"

Two pieces in this series set up the problem. Chains built their AI tools for a journey that starts on their own platforms, while the part where travelers actually discover a hotel moved onto surfaces the chains don't own and can't control. Marriott made the smartest response anyone's made — a spot inside Google AI Mode while still defending its own front door — but on Google's terms and at a price nobody has put in writing yet. The discovery layer has an owner. It isn't the hotels.

One asset sits outside all of that. It's been sitting there for twenty years, treated as a marketing program when it was really a strategic position. The loyalty database.

What an AI agent actually needs

Think about what an AI agent has to know to book a hotel stay on a traveler's behalf. Where that person has stayed before. What they liked. What tier they hold. What rate they're owed. And how to actually complete the payment. None of that is on Google's page. None of it is in ChatGPT's training. It lives in one place: the loyalty program.

Look at the size of what the chains are holding. Marriott Bonvoy has 283 million members, 43 million of them added in 2025 alone, signed up across 68% of its hotels. Hilton Honors has more than 200 million. World of Hyatt hit 63 million at the end of 2025, up 19% in a year. Call these what they are. Not mailing lists. They're detailed records of how hundreds of millions of people travel — where they go, the room they pick, what they spend once they're there, and the card they pay with. That's exactly the picture an agent needs to book for someone without asking twenty questions first.

On the Q4 2025 earnings call, Capuano said Marriott is optimistic that AI will pull more travelers into the Bonvoy ecosystem and strengthen direct booking. Notice the framing. In his telling, the loyalty program isn't something the agentic shift happens to. It's the thing the agentic shift runs on.

What the chains are building toward

IHG's CEO Elie Maalouf confirmed on his own Q4 2025 call that the company is building one unified loyalty and CRM platform on Salesforce, with an AI-powered version coming in 2026. The plan is plain: get all the guest's preference data in one place, clean, and ready for the systems that will handle agentic booking. IHG One Rewards passed nine million app downloads in 2025. The app is what the guest sees. The Salesforce platform underneath is the data an AI agent could reach into.

Hyatt's Mark Hoplamazian went further on his call. Hyatt has already put four large agentic AI platforms to work inside the company, built its own private-cloud setup that runs models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic side by side, and is getting ready for what he called agent-to-agent booking — Hyatt's own AI dealing directly with the AI of a corporate travel manager, a meetings planner, or an individual guest. That's the whole idea in one picture: the brand shows up in the agentic world as a player with its own data, not as a name waiting to be picked on someone else's screen.

Hoplamazian added the honest caveat: "everybody in the world is at the table with Google and everything else." Holding the loyalty data doesn't make the platform dependency go away. It changes what kind of dependency it is.

The catch: you have to open the vault

The loyalty advantage is real. It also comes with a condition most of the excitement skips over.

For an AI agent to pull up a traveler's Bonvoy preferences and finish a booking on its own, Marriott has to open its data to the platform that agent runs on. The natural-language search rolling out on Marriott.com and the Bonvoy app is the part the guest sees. The connections that let an outside AI agent reach in and read that data are the part underneath — and building them means the platform gets to see what the loyalty program knows at the exact moment of booking.

This is why IHG's Salesforce platform and Hyatt's private-cloud setup matter. Both are attempts to hold that data from the hotel's side — to be the source the agents have to ask, rather than a pile of data a platform quietly swallows. Picture the two outcomes. In one, the agent asks you for the guest's preferences every time it books, which means it always needs you. In the other, the agent learns those preferences once, from data it absorbed, and stops asking — which means it's done with you. One keeps the hotel in the loop. The other turns the hotel into stock on a shelf.

The chains building these platforms right now are betting on the first outcome — that agents will keep asking rather than absorb and move on. That's a fair bet given how the technology works today. Whether it holds once the platforms have watched billions of bookings and built their own picture of what travelers prefer is the question nobody can answer yet.

What the loyalty programs were built for

Here's where the series lands. Discovery and booking are pulling apart, and the chains are losing discovery to platforms they'll never own. The AI planners and concierges most chains built guard the booking moment well enough. They do nothing about that split.

Loyalty is the exception. It holds something the platforms don't have and can't copy in a hurry: two decades of detailed records on how hundreds of millions of people travel. If agents end up asking for that data rather than replacing it, the chains that dug the deepest loyalty foundations hold a position that gets stronger over time instead of weaker.

That's the position Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, World of Hyatt, and IHG One Rewards were built for — twenty years before anyone knew that's what they were building.

by Markus Busch, Editor and Publisher of Hospitality.today

Read also: Marriott solved the discovery problem. It traded one intermediary for another.

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