– Marriott International is forging ahead with a direct booking integration within Google’s forthcoming AI-powered travel planning tool, a move that signals a potentially significant shift in how hotels interact with online travel distribution. The partnership, publicly discussed by Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano on Tuesday, raises critical questions about the future of hotel distribution, the potential for disintermediation, and the evolving role of algorithms in travel planning.
Capuano revealed that Marriott is developing a “priority search experience” within Google’s AI Mode, designed to facilitate bookings directly through the AI interface. “We began working with Google to design a priority search experience that will help facilitate bookings through Google’s AI Mode,” Capuano stated during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “The booking will be processed through AI Mode.” This phrasing is deliberate, suggesting a deeper integration than simply linking users to Marriott’s website.
How Google AI Mode Changes the Travel Planning Landscape
Announced last November, Google’s AI Mode allows users to articulate travel plans in natural language – for example, requesting “a hotel near a convention center, with a gym, suitable for business travel, within a certain price range.” The innovation lies not just in the inspiration or comparison phase, but in the potential for the entire customer journey, from initial search to final booking, to occur within a conversational interface.
This raises a key strategic question: will Google AI Mode offer direct, in-chat checkout for select partners like Marriott, or will it primarily function as a redirect to hotel websites and online travel agencies (OTAs)? If the former proves true, a potentially asymmetric model emerges, granting a significant competitive advantage to a limited number of deeply integrated hotel groups in terms of visibility, conversion rates, and control over the booking funnel.
For independent hotels or smaller chains, the risk is relegation to a secondary role, potentially leading to a progressive loss of control over direct demand.
Disintermediation or New Intermediation?
Google positions AI Mode as a user-support tool. However, from the perspective of the hospitality industry, the central issue is control: who governs the relationship with the end customer? If the AI orchestrates the entire experience, the power shifts away from both the hotel and the traditional OTA, residing instead within the algorithm itself. In this scenario, privileged access to AI Mode becomes a strategic asset comparable to, if not exceeding, the influence wielded by major OTAs over the past two decades.
The fact that Marriott is the first major hotel group to publicly discuss this integration is noteworthy. It legitimizes the model, allows Google to test the waters, and likely paves the way for selective integrations with other global brands. For the hotel sector, this represents a potential point of no return: AI will not merely be a supporting operational or marketing tool, but a new gatekeeper of demand.
Marriott’s announcement doesn’t detail the specifics of how Google AI Mode will function, but one thing is clear: the competition will no longer be solely about price, product, or distribution, but about the ability to engage – or not – with the artificial intelligence that determines what the user sees and ultimately purchases.
For those who currently manage hotel assets, the question isn’t whether AI will enter the booking process, but who will be inside the system and on what terms.
The evolution towards AI-governed distribution models compels hotels to fundamentally reassess their marketing strategies, visibility, and demand control.
