HVS Panel: Hotels Must 'Deserve the Recommendation' From AI Agents, Not Just Rank in OTA Search

An HVS-hosted webinar on how hotel operating models will change by 2030, recapped by Hospitality Net, organized its outlook around three themes: flexible ownership structures, AI-driven distribution, and human-centered guest experience. The distribution discussion, led by Joe Pettigrew, Group Chief Commercial Officer at L&R Hotels, made the sharpest claim: hotel discovery is inverting. Rather than competing to “get on the list” in OTA search rankings, properties now have to “deserve the recommendation” from an AI agent responding to a traveler’s prompt with a short, curated shortlist. Pettigrew said these AI-generated recommendations get checked against a hotel’s actual operational reality — room types, facilities, F&B offerings, authentic guest feedback — rather than marketing copy, meaning “operations are becoming the new distribution. Everything you actually do for guests becomes your top-of-funnel.” Ronen Nissenbaum of Leonardo Hotels added that lease, manage, or own are no longer standalone strategies but interchangeable tools operators should pivot between by market condition, while Westmont Hospitality’s Ashley Krais tied both threads together: “AI will handle the coordination; humans should handle the moments guests remember.”

Pettigrew’s funnel-inversion thesis lands directly on a blind spot a separate Hospitality Net brief flagged two weeks earlier: major hotel chains have concentrated their AI investment on defending the direct-booking funnel — conversational search, loyalty interfaces, personalization — built for travelers who already intend to book with them, while the actual discovery journey has shifted to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and social platforms where those same brands have “no presence, no measurement, and no influence.” That piece cited Amadeus-backed research finding 63% of hotels struggle to find qualified corporate leads even before accounting for AI-native discovery.

Put together, the two pieces describe a chain-level miscalibration Pettigrew’s panel is implicitly correcting: if operational reality is becoming the actual top-of-funnel, then the AI tooling worth building isn’t another loyalty interface — it’s making operational data legible to the AI agents doing the recommending. For operators outside the major chains, that’s a genuine opening: verifiable operational quality is a lever independent of marketing budget, and for once it’s one a smaller, well-run property can compete on directly.