Imagine that a few years from now you decide to spend a weekend in Barcelona. Instead of opening Google, checking Booking.com, reading reviews and comparing hotel websites, you simply tell your AI agent that you want a quiet boutique hotel close to the city center, preferably locally owned, with excellent breakfast and credible sustainability practices, for no more than €150 per night.
Your agent searches hundreds of properties, compares prices and availability, reads reviews, evaluates locations and considers what it already knows about your travel preferences. It returns with one recommendation, and perhaps, with your permission, books it.
From the consumer’s perspective, this sounds wonderful. From the perspective of a hospitality marketer, however, something much more interesting has happened.
Hundreds of hotels competed for your booking, but you never saw most of them. You did not visit their websites, see their advertisements or compare their photographs. You did not reject those hotels. Your AI agent did.
This seemingly simple scenario could represent a fundamental change in hospitality marketing. For decades, our marketing knowledge has been organized around consumer behavior. We study how consumers search for information, evaluate alternatives, develop attitudes and eventually make decisions. Behind all of this sits one basic assumption: the consumer is the decision-maker.
Agentic AI begins to challenge that assumption.
What If the Consumer Is No Longer the Only Decision-Maker?
Studies have found that people are open to letting artificial intelligence make certain decisions for them. For example, researchers Candrian and Scherer showed in 2022 that individuals are willing to give autonomous AI the power to make decisions. Later, in 2024, Ahmad Husairi and Rossi explored this idea further in the context of shopping, finding that consumers are willing to let AI handle parts of the buying process, as long as they still have some control.
More recently, Bilgihan and their team made a distinction between two types of AI: advisory AI, which helps consumers make decisions, and transactional AI, which can actually take action on behalf of the consumer.
It makes a huge difference in hospitality whether an AI system just gives you some options or actually takes the initiative to make a decision for you. If an AI system says “here are some hotels you might like”, it’s giving you choices. But if an AI agent says “I’ve found the perfect hotel for you based on what I know about your preferences, and I’ve already booked it”, that’s a whole different story.
The AI is no longer just a tool to help you decide, it’s an active participant in the decision-making process.
From Hotel to Consumer, to Hotel to AI Agent to Consumer
Traditionally, we could think about hospitality purchasing as:
Hotel → Consumer → Booking
Digital platforms already changed this relationship because search engines and OTAs influence what consumers see. Agentic AI could take it considerably further:
Hotel → AI Agent → Consumer → Booking
And eventually perhaps:
Hotel → AI Agent → Booking
The intermediary is no longer simply organizing information. It may evaluate alternatives and make the choice.
This raises an important question for hospitality marketers:
What happens when the person experiencing our marketing is no longer the same actor making the purchasing decision?
Your Beautiful Advertisement May Never Reach the Decision-Maker
Hospitality brands invest heavily in photography, storytelling, social media, influencers and carefully designed websites because humans respond to these signals. A photograph can make us imagine ourselves beside a swimming pool, while a story about a family-run hotel can create an emotional connection before we arrive.
An AI agent might have a different opinion. It can look at lots of things all at once, like how much it costs, where it’s located, what the cancellation policy is, what the rooms are like, and thousands of reviews from other people. It can also consider whether the hotel is eco-friendly, how easy it is to get around from there, and other details.
This does not make emotional branding irrelevant. Consumers still develop aspirations, identities and relationships with brands. However, there may increasingly be another layer between those preferences and the final purchase.
A traveler might say, “I care about sustainability, prefer smaller hotels and love authentic local food,” while the AI agent determines which hotel actually satisfies those preferences best.
Hospitality May Soon Have Two Customers
Hospitality businesses may therefore need to think about two audiences simultaneously.
The first remains the human traveler, who responds to emotion, identity, authenticity, memories and meaningful experiences.
The second is the AI agent acting on behalf of that traveler, which needs to understand whether the hotel’s offering corresponds with the consumer’s preferences.
This does not mean creating advertisements for robots. It means ensuring that the value a hotel creates is visible, credible and understandable to the systems from which AI agents gather information.
Consider sustainability. One hotel may genuinely operate sustainably but communicate this through vague statements such as “we care about our planet.” Another provides transparent information about energy use, food sourcing, local employment, certifications and waste reduction. When an AI agent is asked to identify the more sustainable property, this difference could become important.
Hotels have spent years learning how to make their offerings attractive to consumers. They may now also need to make them understandable to machines.
From SEO to AAO: AI Agent Optimization
Hospitality has experienced similar transformations before. Search engines forced hotels to learn Search Engine Optimization. OTAs taught properties to manage rankings, reviews, availability and pricing. More recently, generative AI has created discussions around Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization.
Agentic AI may take us another step forward toward what we might call AI Agent Optimization (AAO): understanding how brands can become more likely to be identified, evaluated, trusted and selected by AI agents acting for consumers.
The distinction is important.
Traditional SEO essentially asks whether consumers can find the hotel.
AAO would ask whether an AI agent has sufficient reason to choose it.
This means hospitality marketers may increasingly need to focus on the quality, consistency, credibility and accessibility of information across their digital ecosystem, rather than concentrating only on attracting human attention.
What Happens to Brand Loyalty When AI Knows You Better?
Let’s say you’ve been loyal to the same hotel brand for a decade. Your AI assistant is aware of this, but it also knows what really matters to you: a peaceful atmosphere, eco-friendly practices, and food that’s sourced from local suppliers.
Now, when you’re planning your next trip, your AI assistant suggests an independent hotel that’s never been on your radar. It has glowing reviews, a stronger commitment to sustainability, a more desirable location, and a price tag that’s easier on the wallet.
Do you remain loyal to the brand you know, or trust the agent that has successfully organized your previous trips?
If consumers increasingly choose the second option, AI could reshape how brand equity operates. Strong brands will remain valuable because consumers may explicitly instruct their agents to prioritize them. At the same time, AI could make unfamiliar brands more competitive by reducing the uncertainty associated with choosing something unknown.
On the other hand, big hotel chains might come out on top because they have tons of organized data, reviews, and a strong online presence that AI systems can easily analyze. Amazing independent hotels might get lost in the shuffle if their information is all over the place or hard to confirm.
Which scenario will dominate is not yet clear. That uncertainty itself makes AI agent behavior an important area for hospitality research.
From Consumer Behavior to AI Agent Behavior
For a long time, researchers have been studying how people look for information, create lists of options, assess their choices, and make decisions. But now, with AI systems taking over some of these tasks, we may need to rethink our understanding of how consumers make decisions and include AI as another factor that influences their choices.
Some researchers, like Bilgihan et al. (2026), have already pointed out that autonomous AI agents are changing the way consumers make decisions.
The research question therefore moves beyond whether consumers trust AI. We also need to understand what happens after consumers give AI permission to act.
Why does an AI agent recommend one hotel rather than another? Does traditional brand equity influence AI recommendations? Will verified sustainability information matter more than emotional sustainability communication? Could AI agents favor large hotel chains because more information is available about them? What happens when brand loyalty conflicts with an AI recommendation? Can hotels influence whether they enter an AI-generated consideration set?
These questions suggest that we may gradually move from studying only consumer behavior toward also studying AI agent behavior.
AI May Choose the Hotel, but Humans Still Experience Hospitality
When it comes to hospitality, the human touch is still what matters most. Even if AI starts to play a bigger role in deciding where we travel, it’s the people and experiences we encounter during our stay that leave a lasting impression.
The friendly smile that greets us when we arrive, the helpful staff who make our stay comfortable, the delicious food, the cozy atmosphere, and the connections we make with the local community all contribute to an unforgettable experience.
Those experiences then generate satisfaction, reviews, loyalty and recommendations. These become information that future AI agents may use when advising other travelers.
We may therefore enter a fascinating cycle in which human experiences create information, AI interprets that information, AI influences the next purchase, and another human experiences the service.
Hospitality remains human at its core. What changes is the mechanism connecting travelers with hospitality businesses.
“Actually, I Didn’t Choose You. My AI Did.”
A few years from now, a guest may arrive at your hotel and the receptionist may casually ask, “What made you choose us?”
The guest might not mention your Instagram campaign, website, advertisement or even your brand. They may simply answer:
“I didn’t. My AI agent did.”
For decades, hospitality marketers have tried to understand why consumers choose us. The next frontier may be understanding why their AI agents choose us.
The question for hospitality businesses is therefore becoming increasingly important:
When your future guest asks an AI agent to decide, will that agent choose you?
References
Ahmad Husairi, M., & Rossi, P. (2024). Delegation of purchasing tasks to AI: The role of perceived choice and decision autonomy. Decision Support Systems, 179, 114166.
Bilgihan, A., Ostinelli, M., Lorenz, M., & Zhang, Y. (2026). The AI Agent in the Room: Rethinking Consumer Decision-Making in the Age of Autonomous AI. Psychology & Marketing.
Candrian, C., & Scherer, A. (2022). Rise of the machines: Delegating decisions to autonomous AI. Computers in Human Behavior, 134, 107308.
