Amadeus: AI Chatbot Use for Trip Inspiration Tripled in Five Years, and 499 of 500 Hoteliers Are Investing in 2026

Chatbot use for trip inspiration has tripled over five years, from 6% to 18% of travelers, according to Amadeus’s Travel Dreams 2026 research — a survey of 6,000 frequent travelers plus hoteliers and destination management organizations. Francisco Pérez-Lozao Rüter, Amadeus’s President of Hospitality, writes that 69% of travelers now say AI-generated summaries give them enough detail to make a booking decision, with 42% finding AI most useful for trip planning and 36% for inspiration. On the supply side, 499 of 500 surveyed hoteliers plan to invest in AI in 2026, at an average of $319,000 per property — investment appetite that’s essentially universal, not early-adopter behavior anymore. Amadeus also cites early results from its own AI commerce tooling: 44.7% of AI-driven website visitors reached the booking engine, against 25.9% for visitors arriving via organic search.

That conversion gap lines up with an algorithmic explanation for why undifferentiated hotel websites underperform in the first place. A recent explainer on Lighthouse Direct’s predictive AI platform is built on the premise that 98% of hotel website visitors leave without booking because most sites show every visitor the same homepage, offer, and urgency messaging regardless of where they are in the booking journey. Lighthouse scores each visitor in real time on intent, spend, destination flexibility, date flexibility, and length of stay, drawing on more than 400 signals per visitor across 80,000-plus hotels. In a case study at THE THIEF in Oslo, testing the intent algorithm alone produced a 25% conversion uplift among low-intent visitors, €26,000 saved in promotional spend, and €30,545 in incremental revenue from visitors who would otherwise have left.

Read together, Amadeus’s traveler-side numbers and Lighthouse’s site-side case study describe the same shift from two angles: travelers increasingly trust AI-generated summaries enough to book on them, and the hotels capturing that traffic are the ones whose sites respond to an individual visitor’s actual intent rather than showing everyone the same page. For revenue and marketing teams still budgeting AI spend as experimental, the Amadeus number to sit with is $319,000 — that’s already the average, not the ceiling.