Although many industry analysts assume that OTAs will again dominate this distribution, their competitive marketing domination has so far been based on the old consumer behavior of searching and booking. In the agentic AI future, however, it’s no longer about marketing: it’s all about data.By Brian Reeves, Founder and CEO of The roomangel Foundation – 10.16.2025
Artificial intelligence isn’t just another technological innovation: it’s a new way of searching and booking trips that is not only transforming the entire booking funnel but also how major OTAs will capture this new traveler. So what does this mean for hotels when it comes to distribution strategy?
In this new scenario, instead of opening 10 tabs on Google to search and book trips, hotel bookings are made agentically. That is, through an AI Agent where the search is no longer done through keywords but through conversations that allow you to search, compare, book, and hyper-personalize your experience all in one place.
Although many industry analysts assume that OTAs will again dominate this distribution, their competitive marketing domination has so far been based on the old consumer behavior of searching and booking. In the agentic AI future, however, it’s no longer about marketing: it’s all about data. If hotels play their cards right, direct bookings will dominate and distribution costs will fall dramatically.
In this sense, there are five data dimensions that will determine how and where agentic bookings will be made:
- Speed: Data speed must allow agents to deliver instant, hyper-personalized experiences, turning inquiries into bookings faster than traditional OTAs.
- Data structure: When data is unstructured, AI tries to fill the gaps and infers. In doing so, it often hallucinates, which causes a variety of problems. Thus, data speed and structure are paramount for all future players. They are the baseline if you like, but an unlikely source of competitive advantage. The next three data dimensions, however, are where hotel-direct wins big, in my opinion.
- Depth: Hyper-personalized agentic requests require deep hotel data. Just imagine where the data for this sample request would come from: “I need a 4-star hotel in central London on Monday, December 1st. A room on a high floor, away from the elevator, with an iron and ironing board, and a pull-out bed for a 3-year-old. A dinner reservation at 8 PM on the 1st and a babysitting service from 7:30 to 10:30 PM that evening.” Identifying the data required to fulfill and then hyper-personalize a price for the above quickly shows how shallow OTA data is.
- Trust: Trust is arguably the biggest challenge for agentic AI. How does AI know the hotel is real, the room pictures are authentic, the price is not hallucinated, and the booking terms and conditions will not change? roomangel Foundation is building the verified agentic web for hospitality. Provided free of charge to hotels, this is a simple-to-implement cryptographic verification system that certifies all hotel data. This ensures AI agents can fully trust the provenance and integrity of the data consumed in agentic conversations.
- Value: How will agentic AI know if the quoted room price represents good value for money? Tagging every hotel rate with a value-for-money code (a value signal) that is objective, transparent, and has consumer regulatory oversight ensures agents that they are not overpaying, or perhaps saving a percentage from an objectively calculated expected rate. This is a powerful tool for hotel-direct and is diametrically opposed to the commission model that heavily influences OTA search results.
Loyalty and rewards systems in this agentic world will become part of the overall value dataset, but we will need to rethink what that agentic loyalty marketplace might look like. There is no technical reason, for example, that a customer cannot define the rewards that are meaningful to them. For example: “For this hotel booking, I would like rewards in the form of Emirates Skywards points, Amazon vouchers, or XYZ.”
The future of hotel distribution will soon be unrecognizable. Hotels that understand and leverage these five dimensions won’t just adapt; they will lead the agentic era. Direct bookings will dominate, distribution costs will drop, and the old OTA-driven rules that shaped the industry for decades will be left behind. Those who embrace deep, trustworthy, and actionable data will define the next generation of travel, while those clinging to traditional models’ risk being left out entirely.
Brian Reeves is Founder and CEO of The roomangel Foundation, an industry initiative to take back control of distribution and provide a better way for consumers to search and book hotels.. He was the Founder of Avvio, the multi-award winning booking engine and hotel digital marketing company. Under his leadership, Avvio won four consecutive Deloitte Fast 50 tech awards and he was short-listed for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Brian has spoken widely on the subject of hotel distribution and shares valuable insights on the consumer psychology of hotel search and booking.
Are you an industry thought leader with a point of view on hotel technology that you would like to share with our readers? If so, we invite you to review our editorial guidelines and submit your article for publishing consideration.
Appeared first on: hoteltechnologynews.com
