Your Hotel Name: How OTAs Bid on It in ChatGPT Ads

OTAs Are Bidding on Your Hotel Name in ChatGPT Ads

Yes, OTAs are bidding on your hotel's brand name within ChatGPT ads. This practice, similar to what happens in traditional search engines, aims to divert potential direct bookings through sponsored cards shown below ChatGPT's answers, impacting your direct revenue and brand control.

Understanding ChatGPT Ads for Hotels

ChatGPT ads are sponsored cards that appear below the AI's generated answers for logged-in users on Free and Go tiers. These ads never influence the organic answer itself. They feature an advertiser name, favicon, title, copy, a square image, and a landing page URL. For hotels, this means new opportunities but also new challenges in protecting your brand.

How OTAs Use Your Brand Name

Research from the LLM Pulse ChatGPT Ads Library, which observed 81,988 unique ads, shows major OTAs are active. Booking.com, Expedia, Priceline, Hotels.com, and Tripadvisor were all observed. Crucially, Booking.com has been seen running ads with titles that are specific hotel brand names, like 'Iberostar Paraiso Maya' and 'Grand Palladium Kantenah'. This strategy directly targets users searching for your property, aiming to intercept them before they reach your direct booking channels.

While some hotel brands like Radisson Hotels, IHG, and Hilton also run ads, their approach often focuses on direct booking benefits, such as 'Direct booking gives the best rate and up to 20% member off.' This highlights a key difference: OTAs often bid on your brand, while hotels can use ads to reinforce their direct value proposition.

The Mechanics of ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI's self-serve Ads Manager, launched on May 5, 2026, allows advertisers to create campaigns. Ads are displayed based on "context hints" - descriptions of conversation topics, not exact keywords. This means while you can't bid on precise keywords, you can target relevant conversational contexts. The auction is a relevance-weighted second-price auction, with minimum daily budgets starting from 15 EUR in Europe or 25 USD in the United States.

Campaign objectives include CPM (cost per mille impressions), CPC (cost per click), and oCPC (conversion-optimized CPC). OpenAI recommends a maximum CPC bid of 3 to 5 USD. For hotels, tracking these new AI traffic sources is crucial. Tools like reporte.ai can help you measure visits and referrals coming from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI sources, giving you a full picture of your web analytics alongside hotel revenue context.

Protecting Your Direct Bookings in the AI Era

Understanding that OTAs are active in this new advertising frontier is the first step. Here's what you can do:

• Monitor AI Traffic: Implement analytics that specifically track visits and referrals from AI platforms. This helps you see if users are arriving via AI, and whether they are clicking OTA ads or finding your direct channels.
• Consider Your Own Ad Strategy: Just as Radisson Hotels does, you can run your own ChatGPT ads. Focus on direct booking benefits, loyalty programs, and unique offers. Use compelling ad titles and copy within the recommended character limits (16-24 for title, 32-48 for copy).
• Optimize Landing Pages: Ensure your booking engine and website are fast, mobile-friendly, and provide a seamless booking experience. Your landing page must not be blocked to OpenAI crawlers. You can use UTM parameters to track ad performance in your existing analytics.
• Reinforce Brand Identity: Make sure your direct channels clearly communicate your unique value proposition. Why should guests book directly with you instead of an OTA?

While Booking.com's assistant traffic (paid and organic combined) currently sits below 1% of room nights, the landscape is evolving rapidly. Being proactive in monitoring and strategy is key to maintaining direct bookings in the age of AI.

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