ChatGPT fetched pages from Booking.com, Expedia and other OTAs in 46% of the 240 hotel pricing queries logged on June 25 by Nicolas Sitter, head of AI research at hotel data firm Lighthouse. That share exceeds every other category of source combined, and it explains why a guest asking an AI assistant what a room costs next Friday gets an OTA price rather than the hotel's own.

Sitter, who also co-founded a company selling AI visibility tracking, captured the 240 questions and logged every page ChatGPT fetched to answer them. The model searched the web in 98.8% of cases. Yet it cited the OTA pages far less than it read them: only 11% of OTA pages fetched appeared as links in the answer. ChatGPT takes its prices from the OTAs and credits forums like Reddit. One researcher, one day, and a vendor who sells the fix — but the pattern matches what operators see on their own phones.

The OTAs also sit inside ChatGPT itself. Booking.com and Expedia run their own apps on OpenAI's tools, showing hotels, prices and booking links within the conversation. Booking Holdings chief executive Glenn Fogel described the strategy to the Wall Street Journal plainly: when a traveler in ChatGPT wants to book, "we're right there."

They buy the space under the answer too. ChatGPT has sold ads in the US since February and in Europe since August. When SE Ranking, a search visibility vendor, ran 50,006 US questions through it in July, every ad it found was a single sponsored offer. In travel, Booking.com held that one seat 62.57% of the time. One vendor, one day, one market — but a concentration that leaves independents with no paid route in.

Google runs the same system with a feed instead of a crawl. Search a hotel's name almost anywhere and a price box appears under it, filled by daily OTA feeds. A hotel's own price appears beside the OTA rates only if the property sends Google its rate through Hotel Center or its booking engine. Google has until now filled that gap for hotels that advertised without a feed, sourcing the rate itself. That ends on September 30, according to Google's Hotel Center help page. No feed, no hotel ads.

Miss the deadline and the hotel stays on Google with other companies' prices next to its name — including, under Payments by Booking.com, whatever price Booking.com chose to sell at. Send the feed and Google still decides how many prices appear and which comes first. Feeds that fail Google's accuracy checks get dropped.

In the EU, Google has gone further under the Digital Markets Act. Since September 8, its main search page shows booking sites' prices in one block and hotels in another, without live prices for the hotels. A rule written to protect hotels left only the resellers' prices carrying numbers on the page.

Booking has also moved into Google's AI answer in the United States. Since late August, travellers can plan a trip in AI Mode, pick a hotel and pay with Google Pay without leaving the page. Google named ten partners: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, Trip.com, Choice, Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham. No independent is on the list. An independent enters the answer through a booking site, at the booking site's price. Choice, Hilton and Wyndham can show a points price beside it — so a guest with a Hilton balance weighs the hotel's rate against a night that costs her nothing out of pocket.

The structural imbalance is stark. The large chains have their own rate feeds, their own apps and five of Google's ten AI Mode partner seats. An independent has one lever left: send Google the rate, keep it accurate, and make sure the brand website shows the same number. Even then, Google decides whether the direct price shows first or fourth, and Booking.com's price sits beside it.

For European operators, the practical sequence is short. Audit the September 30 Hotel Center deadline, confirm the direct rate feed passes Google's accuracy checks, and align the website price with what the OTAs show. The machines know the hotel's name. They learned its price from someone else — and until regulators revisit how the DMA blocks live hotel prices on Google's EU results pages, they will keep quoting it that way.