How important is it to have events on your hotel website. Lets find out. Using a real life scenario.
I was doing a little experiment. To complete the entire trip planning with the help of AI. It is a seamless experience. While researching I was constantly observing if any answer returned any web URL. The LLMs over here was Google AI Mode.
I questioned 3 times, with as much detailed a prompt I thought I needed to give. Ultimately at level 3 of questioning , I asked the AI to share what should be my itinerary. It was at this time for the very first time AI Mode started surfacing actual hotel URLs. Webpages detailing the itineraries shared by hoteliers was getting cited. If a LLM has to get information about a future date it HAS to visit websites before producing an answer.
Before this the LLM was mentioning about hotel names (as in brand mentions). It did not have to cite any URL from the hotel websites. It was showing all Google owned properties. Google Business Profile, YouTube etc.
Events are a demand capture and brand building game
During the day to day itinerary phase, LLMs are bound to surface the hotel URLs.
Think of it, when an 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 of the internet database, to find answers to the day to day trip planning. For a future date.
Yes, I get it, I am grossly, simplifying the technology that is used as backend infrastructure to show you an AI answer. I’m trying to keep it simple here.
This 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.
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. The calendar needs to be well maintained, highlighting what are the different events one can experience when they come and visit your location.
As a hotel, you represent the best knowledge-base for your location/region/destination
You are not trying to sell rooms at this point in time. All you are trying to acheive is positioning. Positioning in a guest mind that as a property you have people who are most knowledgable in your local area. Your aim is to capture audience attention who are searching for how they should spend a week at your location. They have not yet started to look for accommodations.
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.Hhave 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.
Pro – Tip : To vizualize various events that a guest can enjoy while they are staying at your property put yourself in their shoes. An event can be as simple as capturing evening sunset beauty from location name. That is an event which will happen in a guests life if they end up staying with you. Events does not need to be grand, or paid necessarily. Put yourself in the guest shoes and describe in as much detail as possible the various micro-events that a guest may experience when they are staying with you.
Taking small steps towards the larger business goal
I know very well, website traffic is a vanity metric. At least in todays day and age with AI being the new normal. Yet, I mention only because of 1 reason. Its a vanity metric. One needs to provide, when setting some context. When taking small steps towards the larger business goal.
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.
Publish events on your hotel website
So what are you waiting for. Get all the popular and noteworthy events that are happening next weekend in your local area have them published on your hotel website.
Thanks
DB
Initially written on – 9th May 2026
Last Updated – 12th November 2026