I was doing a little experiment. To complete the entire trip planning with the help of AI. It is a seamless experience. As I was doing my research, I was constantly looking at how the LLM (over here, Google AI Mode) was responding to my questions.
I questioned 3 times, with as much detailed a prompt I thought I needed to give. At the last stage of my question set, i.e. level 3, where I asked the AI to share what should my itinerary be like, is when it started showing some citation sources from hotel websites.
Before that the LLM was mentioning about hotel names (as in brand mentions) but did not have to cite any URL from the hotel websites. But during the day to day itinerary phase, it was bound to surface the hotel URLs, since event listings were present on some of the hotel websites. Webpages detailing the itineraries were being shared by hoteliers. If the LLM had to get some information, it HAD to go to your website and surface the answer.
Yes, I get it, I am grossly, simplifying the technology that is used at the backend infrastructure to show you an AI answer. I’m trying to keep it simple here.
Think of it, even when LLM need to provide a day to day itinerary to any user for a forward looking date, it does not have that information historically stored in its database. It has to go out there in the wild west world of the huge database the internet has to offer, to find answers to the day to day trip planning.
That is exactly where the opportunity lies in for hoteliers to work collaboratively with the ancilliary businesses that are based in their location, to work together and share hypothetical trip itineraries containing various “events” that one would experience if they are staying at your property from June 17th to June 22nd 2026.
If there’s a requirement, I can try to make a more detailed text/video highlighting why it is so important, more than ever, to ensure you have an events calendar on your hotel website, that is well maintained, highlighting what are the different events one will experience when they come and visit your location.
I deliberately did not write “why one should come and stay at your property”. The reason for that? At this point in time, you are looking at client acquisition through an online organic channel. Many guests may not even be aware of your brand. As such, what you are trying to do, is capture audience who is searching for how they should spend a week at your location. They have not yet starting to look for accomodations.
At this point in time, it is a great position to position yourself. As a hotel, you represent the best knowledgebase for your location. You are not trying to sell rooms at this point in time. All you are trying to acheive is positioning.
At this point, your website needs to load fast, needs to be slick and on-brand. It should have great content in terms of the events one can enjoy. If you can have a blog, with great information that a probable guest may want to read, that would be an added benefit. having detailed itineraries linked with the events calendar can really signal a strong authoritative signal towards the crawlers coming to the site to fetch relevant information which it would utilize in the future to produce a confident answer.
If utilized properly, one can generate more than 30% of the total website traffic from this demand capture strategy.
I know very well, website traffic is a vanity metric in todays day and age, yet, I mention about website traffic only because of 1 reason. Its a vanity metric, one needs to provide, when setting some context.
Brand mentions is what you would want to capture more and more for the various queries fanning out from user prompts in LLMs. Do you have a framework to see what are the sub-queries fanning out for the prompts? Let me know if you do not. I can share a detailed article on that.
Thanks
DB
9th May 2026