AEO for travel and hospitality brands
Get named in the itineraries and recommendations AI assistants now build for travellers before they ever reach a booking site.
Trip planning is the single most obvious AI use case, and travellers adopted it immediately. Assistants build itineraries, recommend neighbourhoods, and name specific hotels and restaurants. That recommendation happens upstream of every booking channel you currently measure.
The competitive picture is unusual too: the sources engines cite for travel skew heavily toward independent guides, editorial reviews, and forums rather than brand sites. Hotel and destination brands that only publish their own marketing are largely absent from the material engines actually draw on.
Prompts that matter here
- best hotels in [city] for [traveller type]
- [destination] itinerary for [duration]
- where to stay in [city]
- is [property] worth the price
What to do
- 1
Track itinerary prompts, not just brand prompts
The recommendation that matters is 'where should I stay in [city]', not 'tell me about [hotel]'. Build the prompt set around the planning questions travellers actually ask.
- 2
Compete on traveller segment, not on adjectives
Engines answer segmented questions — for families, for solo travellers, for a first visit. Content organised around who the trip is for is far more citable than a generic property description.
- 3
Get into the independent guides
Editorial guides and destination publications are cited disproportionately in travel answers. Earning a place in them moves visibility more than any amount of on-site copy.
- 4
Keep the practical details current
Seasonality, transit times, what is walkable, what is closed in winter. Practical specifics are what assistants quote when building an itinerary, and they are what most brand sites omit.
Where Elmo fits
Elmo tracks destination and segment-level prompts across engines so you can see which itineraries name you and which name a competitor, and which independent sources are driving those citations.
Other industries
/ FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do AI assistants pick hotels and destinations to recommend?
- Mostly from independent sources — editorial guides, review platforms, and forums — rather than from brand marketing. Properties that appear in credible third-party coverage get named far more often than those relying on their own site alone.
- Does AI trip planning affect direct bookings?
- It shifts where the decision is made. If the assistant names your property while building the itinerary, the traveller arrives at a booking channel already decided. If it names a competitor, the comparison never happens.
Ready to track your AI visibility?
Deploy Elmo in minutes and start monitoring how ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews talk about your brand. Open source, self-hosted, free.