The Digital Invisibility of Hotels and Accommodation: Our Research on AI Readiness of Hospitality Websites

In today’s hospitality landscape, industry professionals increasingly emphasize the importance of direct bookings and digital visibility. But in an era where AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini already plan trips and suggest accommodation options on behalf of travelers, one key question arises: Can artificial intelligence even find and recognize your hotel online?

Our latest research, based on an in-depth analysis of over 1,500 hotel and accommodation websites across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, and Croatia, reveals an alarming reality: 88% of these websites are not technically prepared for AI. In simpler terms, AI systems "don’t see" your official site. They don’t know who you are, where you are, or what you offer, so they can’t recommend you.

This digital oversight comes at a high price. It’s estimated that hotels globally pay between €40 and €75 billion annually in commissions to online travel agencies (OTAs). A significant portion of that could be reduced if hotels were more AI-ready. While this is a well-known cost in the industry, our findings show that part of it stems directly from the lack of technical preparedness and poor digital autonomy. Hotels, unintentionally, are sabotaging their own direct booking potential, not because OTAs force them to, but because their own websites aren’t structured in a way AI systems can understand or prioritize.

Core Technical Gaps: Schema Markup, Meta Descriptions, and Open Graph

Our audit uncovered several fundamental technical shortcomings that directly impact visibility in both search engines and AI systems:

• Missing structured data (Schema Markup): This machine-readable "business card" is missing from 88% of websites. Without it, AI tools cannot identify that a page represents a specific hotel. In practice, your identity as a provider remains invisible to algorithms that sift through and summarize content.

• Weak or absent meta descriptions: Around 60% of websites lack meta descriptions, leading to bland or irrelevant snippets in search results. Without compelling summaries, click-through rates drop, and visibility suffers.

• Incomplete Open Graph tags: Between 40% and 50% of websites don’t provide Open Graph titles, descriptions, or images. This results in poor link previews when shared on platforms like Facebook or X (formerly Twitter), diminishing reach and engagement.

These may seem like minor SEO tasks, but together they define your digital storefront. Right now, most accommodation providers in the region are effectively greeting guests with a blank sign on the door. In Croatia, the situation is particularly dire: only 39.5% of hotel websites use meta descriptions, compared to over 60% in Austria and Switzerland. This means many Croatian hoteliers lose the opportunity to shape how they appear to both traditional search engines and emerging AI-powered platforms.

AI and the Invisibility of Hotels

When key information is not machine-readable, you disappear from digital maps. We compare this to a Hollywood-style party: everyone wants to get in, but nobody knows the dress code. In the world of AI, that “dress code” is Schema Markup—clear, structured signals that tell AI tools who you are and what you offer. If your website lacks them, AI agents like ChatGPT and Gemini are left guessing—and they’ll often just skip you entirely.

According to our findings, 30–50% of hotel-related content is currently invisible to AI tools. This varies by country, hotel category, and micro-location. Vast amounts of legitimate hospitality information simply never reach the digital assistants that travelers increasingly rely on to plan their trips.

Meanwhile, AI assistants lean heavily on dominant sources, especially OTAs. Booking.com, for example, appears in at least 67% of ChatGPT answers and in over half of Gemini’s results. Independent hotel websites are rarely cited. In fact, over half of all hotels we analyzed were mentioned only once across thousands of AI-generated responses. The average AI answer cites just 7–8 sources. If you’re not among them, AI assumes you don’t exist.

This means OTA platforms increasingly shape how AI "talks" about your hotel. Even when a guest isn’t looking for an intermediary, AI systems filter the travel landscape through OTA content and structures. Hotels that ignore these technical foundations risk falling into what we call "digital underground" - an online limbo where your website exists, but AI can’t understand or recommend it.

It’s not just a tech issue, it’s a strategic problem, and in today’s landscape, visibility is no longer dictated by ad budgets, but by algorithms.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Digital Autonomy

Our findings are a wake-up call for hoteliers across Central and Southeastern Europe. The good news is that the fixes are not complex. But they do require a return to digital basics and a commitment to reclaiming control over your digital identity.

• Step one: Fix first impressions. Add Open Graph images, titles, and descriptions so your content is visually rich and correctly displayed in both social media and search results.

• Step two: Speak the language of machines. Schema.org implementation makes your website understandable to AI. Clearly identifying your hotel’s name, address, contact info, star rating, and amenities.

• Step three: Optimize core pages. AI systems are most likely to cite location pages, contact details, room descriptions, cancellation policies, and food and beverage sections.

Every hour spent improving your site’s technical readiness can save thousands of euros in OTA commissions, and help you regain control of how your hotel is represented online.

Source: Nokumo Research Report "AI Readiness of Accommodation Providers' Websites in DACH, Slovenia and Croatia" containing Authors' analysis of 1,504 accommodation provider websites across Austria (n=7,262 pages), Switzerland (n=4,752 pages), Germany (n=10,112 pages), Croatia (n=6,447 pages), and Slovenia (n=2,362 pages), conducted in August 2025.