ChatGPT Is Already Booking UK Holidays. Is Your Stay on the List?

Not long ago, planning a weekend away meant twenty open tabs, a comparison site and a bit of a row about dates. Now loads of people just ask ChatGPT, "find me a dog friendly hotel on the Isle of Wight with sea views for under £200 a night", and get a shortlist back in seconds.

So the big question for any hotel, holiday park or attraction on the Island or the South Coast is a simple one. When someone asks AI where to stay or what to do, does your name come up? And if it does, does the booking come to you or to someone taking a cut?

I'll be straight, I've spent a fair chunk of this year poking at ChatGPT pretending to be a holidaymaker, and the results are a bit of a mixed bag. Here's what's happening and what you can actually do about it.

The big travel brands are already inside ChatGPT

This isn't a "one day" thing anymore. Holiday rental group Awaze, the business behind cottages.com, launched an app inside ChatGPT in February 2026 so people can search and book UK cottages in a conversation. Radisson Hotel Group has gone a step further, with a ChatGPT plugin that lets travellers find, compare and book hotels, then hands them over to Radisson's own site to finish the booking. Radisson says early conversion from the plugin is around 1.5 times its organic search.

And the travellers are there too. Phocuswright's research found that 56% of US travellers used AI for planning, booking or help in destination on at least one trip in the past year, up from 33% in the first half of 2025. It's US data, but we tend to follow pretty quickly on this stuff.

The bit I find most useful from that same research: half of travellers who see AI answers in search engines still click through to the source website. So AI isn't replacing your website, it's deciding which websites get the visit.

Big chains can build their own ChatGPT apps. Most independent stays can't, and honestly don't need to. What you need is for AI to understand you well enough to recommend you, and a booking path that's dead easy once someone lands.

How ChatGPT decides who to recommend

AI tools don't have a secret list of favourite hotels. They pull together what's already out there about you and look for clear, consistent answers. In plain terms they're reading:

If those sources are thin, out of date or contradict each other, AI tends to play it safe and recommend somebody else. Which, annoyingly, is usually the big brand with loads of pages about everything.

1. Make your website answer the questions guests ask

Think about how people talk to ChatGPT. Nobody types "hotel Shanklin". They ask "quiet hotel near the beach in Shanklin with parking and a good breakfast". Your site needs to answer that kind of question in plain English, somewhere a machine can read it.

A few quick wins:

This is the same groundwork that turns visitors into guests, which is why we bang on about building websites that convert into bookings for hotels and attractions. If your site is old or hard to update, it might be worth a look at how we build websites for destination brands.

2. Get your Google Business Profile spot on

ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's own AI answers all lean on local listings for "near me" style questions. Check yours properly:

We've written a full guide to local SEO for Isle of Wight businesses if you want the step by step version.

3. Treat reviews as your AI sales pitch

When AI recommends somewhere, it often summarises reviews. "Guests love the breakfast and the sea views" is basically your pitch written by strangers. So:

4. Add structured data (schema) to your site

This sounds techy, but it's basically labels for machines. Schema markup tells search engines and AI tools "this is a hotel, here's the address, here are the rooms, here's the price range, here's the rating". Without it they have to guess.

The useful types for stays and attractions are Hotel or LodgingBusiness, TouristAttraction, LocalBusiness, Offer and FAQPage. Most decent WordPress setups can handle this with the right plugin, or your developer can add it in an afternoon.

5. Make the direct booking path obvious

Here's where a lot of places fall over. AI sends someone to your site, they can't find the "book now" button, or the booking engine opens in a weird pop up, so they go back and book on a comparison site instead. You still get the guest, but you pay the commission.

Check the basics:

If you're already getting traffic but not enough bookings, our post on improving hotel and attraction website conversion goes deeper on this.

6. Measure AI referral traffic in GA4

You can't improve what you can't see. The good news is visits from ChatGPT and other AI tools often show up in Google Analytics 4 as referrals from sources like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com.

To keep an eye on it:

Some AI traffic still lands as "direct" because not every tool passes on where it came from, so treat the numbers as a floor rather than the full picture. Either way, tying it back to real bookings is the bit that matters, and we've covered that in tracking which marketing actually produced your bookings.

Do you need a ChatGPT app like Radisson?

For most independent hotels and attractions on the Island, no, not yet. Building and maintaining an app inside ChatGPT is a big chain sized project. You'll get far more from getting the basics above right, because that's what AI reads when it decides who to recommend in the first place. If you get a strong, consistent presence everywhere AI looks, you're in the running without the tech budget.

FAQs

Want to know where you stand?

If you're not sure whether AI is recommending you, or where last month's bookings actually came from, start with our free marketing scorecard. It takes a few minutes and shows you where the gaps are.

Media House Agency is a digital marketing agency for destination brands on the Isle of Wight and South Coast. We help hotels, holiday parks and attractions get found, get chosen and get booked direct. If you'd rather just have a chat about it, get in touch with the team and we'll take a look :)

Ready to put this into practice?

At Media House we turn strategy like this into measurable growth. Let’s talk about how it applies to your brand.

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