At the Glamping Show Americas in September I asked a room full of operators how many of them had been pitched an AI product in the last six months. Nearly every hand went up. Then I asked them to keep their hand up if anyone had explained what it would actually do for them on a Monday morning. Most of the hands came down.
There's plenty of talk about what AI might do for hospitality one day, and very little about what it does for a small property today. That leaves operators open to getting it wrong in two directions. Some buy into the hype and pay for things that don't work yet. Others get so tired of the hype that they tune all of it out, including the one thing that genuinely is changing, which is how guests find somewhere to stay.
What's real, and what someone is selling you
Start with the hype. Most of the confusion comes from things that are half-true being sold as if they were finished, so it's worth sorting them, and I'll include a few things I'd personally make money from if you believed the hype.
Some of it is genuinely useful right now. Drafting replies, listings and policy pages that you then edit is real. So is answering the same forty questions you get every week, as long as the AI is reading your actual facts. One free thing to try tonight: paste a year of your reviews into any assistant and ask for the three most common complaints. You'll have an operations audit in about four minutes.
A lot of it is real but oversold. A chatbot on your website is good at fielding questions, which has its uses, but fielding questions and taking bookings are different jobs, and they get sold as the same thing. AI answering your phone after hours is real. AI as your new general manager isn't. And if someone's offering dynamic pricing for a twelve-unit property, ask what exactly it's learning from, because there isn't much data there.
Then there's what isn't real yet. Nobody can sell you a place in ChatGPT's answers. ChatGPT does run ads now, but they're labeled, they sit underneath the answer and they don't change it. Agents booking your inventory from start to finish are getting closer, but they're not here today. And AI won't fix a weak location or weak photos. Please don't use AI-generated photos either, your guests will spot them.
If you only take one question into your next sales call or demo, make it "what information does it use, and where does it get it from?"
A real product can answer that in a sentence. If you get a vague answer or the word "proprietary," that's your answer.
The part that is changing
The thing people risk tuning out along with the hype is much quieter. AI isn't booking your sites yet, but it is already deciding which sites a guest even hears about.
Think about a couple in Denver at the end of a long week. They're not going to type your property's name into Google, because they don't know it. They'll open ChatGPT or Gemini and type something like this:
What comes back is two or three places, by name, with a line or two about each one.
If you're not one of those two or three, that couple never hears about you. If you are one of them, the assistant is describing you from whatever it managed to find, which may or may not include the vintage wagon you actually have or the fact that it has its own bathroom. And when the couple is ready to book, they either end up on your site or on a marketplace that's very happy to take the commission.
This year made all of that more concrete. ChatGPT pulled back its travel checkout in March and now mostly builds the shortlist and hands guests off, often to an OTA. In late August Google started letting people in the U.S. book hotels inside AI Mode, and all ten of its launch partners were big chains or OTAs. Meta's Muse, an agent that goes off and does things for you, passed two and a half million downloads in its first two weeks, and people are already booking hotel rooms over text with assistants like Instinct. They all work differently, but they behave the same way. They recommend what they can describe, and they book what they can interact with. If the details about your property are vague, buried or contradict each other, they'll skip you, guess, or send the guest somewhere with tidier information.
Adjectives don't hold a Saturday
Picture two properties side by side.
It has four safari tents and a vintage wagon. The wagon sleeps two with a private bathroom, dogs are $40 a night and the last mile is a dirt road.
"A unique luxury glamping experience in the Colorado mountains."
Ask an assistant about a dog-friendly stay next Saturday and the first one gets recommended with the details a guest needs to book. The second gets a polite note that its pet policy and availability aren't listed, and a suggestion to contact the property directly. Most guests won't bother.
Nobody needs to panic
I want to be clear about the scale of this, because the industry loves a crisis. Booking Holdings said in August that under one percent of its room nights come from AI chatbots. Lighthouse put AI referrals at about one percent of hotel website visits. The volume is small.
The people who do arrive that way are a different story. Industry reporting on Similarweb data has ChatGPT hotel referrals converting at roughly double the rate of normal search, something like eleven percent against five. By the time someone clicks through from an assistant, they've already compared you and they're most of the way to booking.
It reminds me of mobile websites around 2009. The people who quietly sorted theirs out that year didn't have a dramatic year, they just weren't scrambling in 2012. Nothing breaks this season if you do nothing. But the work is cheap right now, and I don't expect it to stay that way.
Five things that cost nothing
- Ask three different assistants about your property the way a guest would, without using your name, and screenshot what comes back. That's where you're starting from.
- Put the basics on your own site as plain text: exact address, check-in and check-out, pet policy, unit types and how many each one sleeps, a price range and your cancellation terms. Not in a PDF, not only in a photo, and not only inside the booking widget.
- Make sure pets, check-in times and unit counts say the same thing on your website, your Google Business Profile and every listing. When sources disagree, you're more likely to get dropped than guessed.
- Decide who answers the phone after 7pm. A person, a voicemail you actually return, or a system, as long as it's a decision. You already know what happens to the call that rings while you're turning over a tent.
- Call your booking software provider and ask what an AI assistant gets back when it checks your availability today. Not what's on the roadmap, what it gets today.
People drive four hours to stay with you because of the human part of this business: the host who remembers them, the fire pit, the view from the deck in the morning. AI isn't going to replace any of that, and you don't need to buy every product with AI in its name. What you can't afford is to tune it all out, because guests are already asking assistants where to go, and the job now is making sure the answer includes you.
See what AI says about your property
Grevon's free AI visibility report asks the major assistants about your property and shows where you appear, what they say and who they're quoting. It takes a couple of minutes.