As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more accessible and prominent for consumers, hoteliers should consider how their hotels can gain acceptance for large language models (LLM). Consumers are increasingly using LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot to plan their travels, including finding hotels to book for their trips. For hotels, understanding generative engine optimization (GEO)—a digital marketing strategy that can gain visibility among LLMs—is critical to attracting this group of AI-savvy travelers. GEO can optimize content for AI recognition when guests search for their next vacation spot.
Although important, GEO is a newer term to hoteliers, who may not realize that optimizing their online content for LLM can help attract bookings. Enter Hospitality firstthe company is launching a new GEO playbook for its hoteliers. The goal of the GEO Handbook is to align hotel leadership with the importance of GEO and equip them with the business acumen and best practices to succeed in an AI-driven search environment. It includes strategies for ensuring hotel websites are kept up to date to maximize content and increase credibility, while emphasizing the importance of user-generated content and its impact on GEO.
“Statistically, more and more people are using GEO every day,” said Jenna Fishel, chief commercial officer at First Hospitality. “We want to make sure hotels have the tools they can implement and take action to stay ahead of the curve. We want to be proactive, not reactive.”
The idea for the GEO Playbook stemmed from First Hospitality's creation of an Artificial Intelligence Council, with the support of company President and CEO David Duncan, Executive Chairman Sam Schwartz, and the leadership of Chief Technology Officer Jason Segebrecht and Vice President of Business Intelligence and First Analytics Mike Kuzmar, to lead and expand the adoption of AI across the organization. The committee includes members from various departments including analytics, investments, hotel leadership, human resources and marketing. “Within this committee, we first started to understand the space and then tried to evaluate the business area because there were different business leaders in the space and on the committee,” said Alec Schraegle, senior director of digital marketing at First Hospitality. “That's part of how GEO Playbook was born. Now that we have a dedicated AI space, let's put our resources and focus into it.”
easily accessible resources
Especially since the subject may be new to hoteliers, the GEO Playbook is designed to be easy to understand. It also needs to be compatible with all hotel types and operating budgets, offering free, low-cost and higher-level investment options to ensure hoteliers can use it to improve AI recognition.
“We wanted to make it almost like a pager,” Schlegel explains. “We want the general manager to be the captain of the ship. We want to make sure they understand or buy into it. And, obviously, there are different brands, the major brands, that are trying to do their own thing. We try to understand from those brands and stay connected with them because ultimately what this playbook is going to do is fill those gaps.”
Fishel added: “We recognize that these brands are also taking steps in the right direction, but as a hotel management company, we want to differentiate ourselves in terms of AI and GEO and forge our own path forward.”
measure success
Currently, GEO Playbook has been rolled out to 12 hotels to test how it works and collect data.
“We don’t want to roll it out across the entire portfolio because it’s a new program and we want to stress-test it,” Schraegle emphasized. “We want to make sure we have different brands participating. We also have different hotel types; we have full-service, we have premium select-service. We want to see what the response rates are for different hotel types and different market types.”
Schraegle and Fishel both noted that feedback on GEO Playbook has been positive from hotels that have launched it, but as with search engine optimization (SEO), it takes a while to see results. It's also important for hotels to note the differences between GEO and SEO, as they are similar but have different goals. The goal of SEO is to drive content to rank high in traditional online search engines, while the goal of GEO is to become a source of AI citations.
“As we've seen success, it's going to be more interesting to try to measure GEO versus SEO because for SEO, there are proven algorithms or ways to measure it, and when you look at some of these tools — whether it's Gemini or ChatGPT — they're constantly upgrading their systems and the way they work and the way they view data,” Fishel noted.
