If 2024 and 2025 were about understanding AI-driven discovery, 2026 will be about who mastered it.

Not who experimented.
Not who ran pilots.
Not who added “AI” to a pitch deck.

But who fundamentally rethought how guests find them and who accepted that discovery is no longer linear, measurable by clicks, or owned by a single platform.

We recently sat down with Colin James, one of our directors and a long-time expert in hotel digital visibility, to talk about the hotels that will win in 2026.

As Colin James puts it:

“The critical thing that has to be front and centre for hotels: the ability to dominate acquisition channels.”

That statement sounds simple. It isn’t.

Because in 2026, the very definition of an “acquisition channel” has changed.

For years, hotels optimised around a predictable model:
Impression → Click → CTR → Conversion.

SEO reports, paid media dashboards, attribution models, all built around the assumption that clicks equal intent.

That assumption is breaking.

AI overviews, chat-based search, and conversational discovery are creating a world where:

• Guests get answers without clicking.
• Brand impressions happen without visits.
• Decisions are shaped before a website is ever loaded.

Colin frames it clearly:

“We’re getting a lot of zero-click searches. So, you’ve now got to move up the funnel. It’s no longer about click-through rate, it’s about how prevalent and visible you are within those channels.”

Winning hotels in 2026 will stop asking “Did we get the click?”
They’ll start asking “Were we present when the decision was formed?

In 2026, acquisition channels extend far beyond Google Search.

They include:

• AI Overviews.
• ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot.
• Google Business Profiles. Reddit, Quora, X (Twitter).
• Social discovery.
• Community conversations.
• Branded and unbranded answers inside AI systems.

Or as Colin puts it:

“Any acquisition channel that sits at the forefront of exploration, that’s what dictates who wins.”

The key insight here is exploration, not conversion.

Hotels that still treat discovery as a single channel problem — SEO or paid or social — will lose ground to those who understand discovery as an ecosystem.

One of the hardest truths for hotel marketers to accept is that attribution is becoming unreliable.

A guest might:

• Discover a hotel via an AI answer.
• Validate it through Reddit or reviews. Reaffirm trust via brand mentions.
• Convert days later through a different channel entirely.

Colin explains the shift:

“The whole engagement — from discovery through to conversion — is happening across multiple channels. And that’s okay.”

Hotels that win in 2026 won’t obsess over perfect attribution.
They’ll obsess over yield-informed visibility.

That means understanding:

• RevPAR.
• Occupancy.
• Length of stay.
• Guest value.

…and using those metrics to determine how much dominance they can afford in discovery environments; not just how much they can spend on ads.

Traditional review platforms are losing influence, not because reviews don’t matter, but because conversation matters more.

Static reviews tell a story.
Dynamic debate builds trust.

Colin highlights this difference when discussing platforms like Grok, Reddit, and Quora:

“You’ve now got conversations. Someone says this is the best hotel in Sydney, someone else says it’s the worst — and that dialogue is what AI picks up.”

AI models increasingly prioritise:

• Human language.
• Disagreement.
• Lived experience.
• Contextual nuance.

This is why hotels that only manage Google reviews but ignore broader discourse will struggle to surface in AI-driven answers.

One of the most underestimated levers in 2026 is strategic participation in community platforms.

Colin shares a revealing insight:

“We grew tens of thousands of backlinks in weeks just by answering questions on Reddit and Quora.”

Not through spam.
Not through link schemes.
But by being present where questions were already being asked.

AI systems don’t just crawl websites.
They ingest opinions, answers, and repeated references.

Hotels that:

• Appear in “best hotel” discussions.
• Are referenced in experiential threads.
• Are named organically in answers.

Will gain disproportionate visibility in AI outputs.

This isn’t about gaming the system.
It’s about showing up where trust is formed.

Not all AI systems are equal.

Some lean heavily on traditional search results.
Others pull from live social and community data.

Colin’s perspective is telling:

“I use ChatGPT because I perceive it as independent. Gemini is heavily influenced by Google’s traditional results.”

The implication for hotels is clear:
If your visibility only exists inside Google’s ecosystem, your reach is capped.

Winning hotels in 2026 will diversify where their narrative exists, not just where their listings appear.

Hotels that win in 2026 will:

• Stop chasing clicks and start engineering presence.
• Invest in visibility across efAI, community, and conversational platforms.
• Understand that discovery happens before the website.
• Accept imperfect attribution in exchange for influence.
• Treat brand reaffirmation as part of the funnel, not an afterthought.
• Dominate acquisition channels — within a yield-based framework.

Or, in Colin’s words:

“The more you dominate the acquisition channel, the more likelihood you’ve got of winning — even if the click never happens.”

2026 won’t reward the loudest hotels.
It will reward the most present ones.

The hotels that win won’t ask:
“How do we rank?”

They’ll ask:
“Where are decisions actually being made — and are we visible there?”

That question is uncomfortable.
But it’s the right one.

The hotels willing to answer it honestly will be the ones guests choose — even when no click ever occurs.

With 20+ years in hospitality of all facets, including F&B, hotels, to a refined focus on hospitality digital marketing.