By Emily Keogh, Founder of Palm.
The latest Mews 2026 Hospitality Industry Outlook identifies clean, structured, consistent brand content as “the entry ticket to AI-driven search and booking”. Without it, a hotel does not rank lower in AI-generated recommendations. It is absent from them altogether.
Most hotels currently do not have that “ticket”. I am sure that many are not aware they need one and have not even had basic training or discussions about AI with their comms teams.
The booking journey is collapsing
The report’s central finding is that AI is collapsing the guest journey – search, comparison, booking – into a single conversational interaction. In practice, this means that a guest describes what they want and receives a curated, single answer. The hotel either appears in that answer or it does not. The expert panel rated this among the highest-likelihood, highest-impact shifts facing the industry. By 2035, the panel projects that most hotel discovery and booking will happen through AI-mediated conversation.
The report claims: “Hotels that treat 2026 as a planning year will lose ground. The ones that use it to clean up data, content and systems will be the ones AI can actually find, trust and send business to.”
The foundations determining who benefits from this shift are being laid now. Positions established in 2026 will not be easily disrupted later.
Where technology alone falls short
The Mews report sets out a four-step AI readiness checklist: assess your tech stack, get your content AI-ready, train your team, measure and iterate. Step two is where PMS upgrades and data audits run out of road.
AI systems do not evaluate hotels on their internal data alone. 96% of AI citations are from PR driven press coverage in authoritative titles – it’s by far the number one lever for visibility. A hotel with well-organised internal systems but a thin or generic external presence will not perform in AI recommendations. The technology problem and the brand communications problem are not the same problem, and most importantly solving one does not solve the other.
The differentiation problem and why distinct brand narrative is more important than ever
The Mews expert panel was clear that AI does not create differentiation between properties, it amplifies what is already present in the data it can access. If a hotel’s brand is described in the same terms as its competitors – eg luxury, boutique, locally inspired, iconic – an AI system simply cannot distinguish it from the competition.
Hotels with genuinely distinct characters may be systematically absent from recommendations, not because the experience is lacking, but because that distinctiveness has never been articulated with the precision and consistency these systems require. We need to drive home the same messaging again and again to make it visible.
The communications gap
Editorial coverage in a respected publication now serves two simultaneous functions: it reaches a human readership and it registers as a credible signal for AI recommendation systems.
In short, my PR team is now writing for two audiences – AI bots and humans.
PR was always responsible for building that external footprint. The difference now is that the footprint has a second, algorithmic audience and agencies that have not trained for that are producing coverage that only does half the job.
At Palm PR, we have invested in AI training across one hundred percent of our team for this reason. Every brief, every story, every piece of coverage is now built to perform for both audiences simultaneously. That is not a specialism because in 2026, it is the absolute minimum requirement.
Act now
AI systems learn from accumulated signals. Hotels building authoritative, structured brand presence now are shaping the associations these systems form: associations that compound and that later entrants will find difficult to displace. The Mews report describes this year as make-or-break, and I agree that the logic holds.
The Mews 2026 Hospitality Industry Outlook is available at mews.com. The content readiness section and the AI checklist are worth sharing with your communications partners and asking them directly whether they are equipped to address it.
Upskill more about PR and AI at www.palm-pr.com
