Bridging the Divide Between Hotels and AI-Powered Travel Planning

New AI engine enables hotels to be discovered, understood, and booked by AI agents as travel planning shifts to AI-powered platforms

Lighthouse, the leading commercial platform for the travel and hospitality industry, today announced the launch of Connect AI, an innovative AI engine designed to seamlessly enable deeper connection between hotels and AI powered search and travel planning platforms. 

Connect AI addresses two critical industry challenges: AI agents lack the ability to access structured rate, availability, and contextual hotel information; while hotels lack the ability to enable direct booking capabilities and provide real-time information through AI platforms. 

Consumer adoption of AI has grown faster than any disruptive technology in history, as Mary Meeker recently highlighted with ChatGPT reaching 100M users in less than three months. Yet, despite the rapid adoption of AI for travel planning, hotels are significantly underrepresented in AI-driven search results. According to a recent report by Skift, not a single hotel brand currently appears among the top 10 citations for travel planners in leading AI Overview search results. 

This lack of discoverability and accessible information presents a significant missed opportunity for hotels to drive direct bookings with a new generation of travelers. Hoteliers face enormous opportunity risk without an AI data and connectivity strategy.

Connect AI solves this by creating a comprehensive data bridge between the hospitality industry and the rapidly expanding ecosystem of AI travel planning platforms.

• For Hotels: Connect AI acts as a powerful AI engine, enabling hotel chains and groups to be effortlessly discovered, comprehensively understood, and directly bookable by AI agents. This ensures hotels are surfaced accurately and relevantly in AI-powered travel planning queries, with seamless, commission-free transactions.

• For AI Agents & Large Language Models (LLMs): Connect AI provides a robust data layer, leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that offers AI agents and LLMs scaled access to real-time rates, availability, and rich contextual hotel information. This empowers AI platforms to deliver highly personalized and actionable travel recommendations to their users. Connect AI is a platform agnostic solution that will work seamlessly across multiple AI platforms such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. 

“We’re seeing travelers increasingly turn to AI tools for trip planning, and our data shows this shift is accelerating faster than anyone anticipated,” said Juanjo Rodriguez, Head of Marketing & Direct Growth Products at Lighthouse. “According to Phocuswright research, 50% of travelers plan to use generative AI for leisure travel within the next 12 months. Hotels that connect with AI platforms now will be positioned to capture more value, while those that wait risk missing this transition entirely. Connect AI helps hoteliers get ahead of this curve.”

The primary benefits of Connect AI include:

• Enhanced Discoverability: Connect AI increases the visibility of hotels, ensuring they are prominently surfaced by AI agents utilized by travelers for their planning needs.

• Comprehensive Information Accessibility: Connect AI ensures AI agents have access to all necessary information through a standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, including current rates and availability, alongside crucial contextual details such as location, amenities, and reviews, enabling a richer and more accurate understanding of the property.

• Direct Bookability: Connect AI facilitates direct bookings from users through their AI agent of choice, streamlining the conversion process and empowering hotels to capture more direct revenue.

Lighthouse is uniquely positioned to address these industry challenges due to its unparalleled scale, data accuracy, and extensive integrations:

• Unmatched scale: Lighthouse’s existing infrastructure powers connected data solutions for 80,000+ hotels and monitors rates and availability for more than 300,000 properties with 1.7B daily price changes globally – representing more scale than any other provider across global chains, regional chains, and independent hotels.

• Superior data accuracy: Lighthouse is renowned for presenting the most accurate and up-to-date rates and availability, a critical factor for reliable AI-driven travel planning.

• Extensive bookability & integrations: Connect AI includes support for hundreds of booking engines across the globe, uniquely positioning Lighthouse to help hotels increase direct bookings through all AI channels while maintaining rate integrity.

“Connect AI represents a new approach to marketing and distribution strategy,” said Sergio Zertuche, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Palladium Hotel Group, a pioneering company in the adoption of this technology. “We see this as an exciting opportunity to connect with travelers in new ways. With the speed of AI adoption, we want to ensure our properties are discoverable and bookable when guests search through these new channels.”

Connect AI is now available to select hotel partners as part of an early access program. Hotels interested in exploring connection opportunities are encouraged to visit: www.mylighthouse.com/lp/connect-ai-early-access

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight) is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry. We transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth. We continually innovate to deliver the best platform for hospitality professionals to price more effectively, measure performance more efficiently, and understand the market in new ways.

Trusted by over 65,000 hotels in 185 countries, Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. We strive to deliver the best possible experience with unmatched customer service. We consider our clients as true partners – their success is our success.