Hotels Set the Room Rate, but Channels Now Decide Who Sees the Upsell

Hotels still set the base room rate, but online travel agencies and AI booking agents increasingly decide which guests see upgrade offers and at what price. Markus Busch, editor and publisher of hospitality.today, makes that case in a Hospitality Net opinion piece. Booking.com uses guest data to personalize offers for room upgrades, breakfast and late checkout before the hotel has spoken to the guest, and its Genius loyalty program at Levels 2 and 3 now accounts for more than half of room nights, according to the article.

AI agents add a second layer. Busch points to booking agents from Google and Revolut that hold detailed guest spending histories hotels lack, and to Delta’s AI pricing engine, which aims for “one passenger, one offer, one price.” His summary of the shift: the front desk used to have the upsell conversation at check-in, but now the agent has it first, and whoever builds the answer keeps the margin.

The data gap makes this harder to close. A separate Hospitality Net opinion piece detailed how Booking.com guest emails expire seven days after checkout and Expedia email aliases expire 45 days after checkout, with phone numbers arriving masked. Its author argued that AI booking agents may operate under different data-sharing standards that give those intermediaries permanent guest contact details hotels are denied.

Busch frames the response as investing in first-party guest data and an in-house offer engine, and he describes independent hotels as the most exposed because they lack the data chains build through loyalty programs. A practical test for a revenue team: list the upgrade, breakfast and late-checkout offers a guest can see before the property’s first direct message, and note who priced each one. Anything priced elsewhere is margin the hotel has already conceded.