Barcelona study: independent hotels appear 8 times less often than chains in AI answers
According to a study of 27,360 AI travel answers conducted in Barcelona, independent hotels are 8 times more likely to remain invisible to artificial intelligence than chain hotels. Hotel websites provide only 7% of what AI says about the property.
A study conducted in Barcelona, covering 27,360 AI travel responses, showed that independent hotels appear 8 times less often in AI answers than chain hotels. That is, when a guest asks AI where to stay, the name of an independent property often does not appear in the answer at all.
The second finding of the study is even more striking: hotels' own websites provide only 7% of what AI says about a property. The rest of the answer is formed from other sources — review platforms, directories and third-party sites. In other words, the information on a hotel's official website is a small fraction of the picture AI conveys to the guest.
For independent hotels, this takes the visibility issue to a new level: if competition previously revolved around search results and review ratings, now it is also important to make it into the answer itself. Since chain networks have numerous properties under the same name and a unified flow of information, AI recognizes them more easily.
For small hotels and guesthouses in Azerbaijan, this primarily means that information about the property must be unified and consistent: address, room types, services and price range should be presented identically across different platforms so that AI does not encounter contradictory information.