As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more available and prominent for consumers, hoteliers should consider how their hotels get recognized by large language models (LLMs). Consumers are increasingly using LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot to plan their travel, including finding hotels to book for their trips. For hotels, understanding generative engine optimization (GEO)—a digital marketing strategy that can garner visibility across LLMs—is crucial to capturing this AI-savvy group of travelers. GEO can optimize content to get recognized by AI when a guest is searching for their next getaway.
Although important, GEO is a newer term for hoteliers, who might not be aware that optimizing their online content for LLMs can help capture bookings. Enter First Hospitality, which is rolling out a new GEO Playbook for its hoteliers. The objective of the GEO Playbook is to align on-property leadership with the importance of GEO and give them the business acumen and best practices to succeed in an AI-driven search environment. It includes strategies to ensure hotels’ websites are up-to-date to maximize content and improve trustworthiness, while addressing the importance of user-generated content and its impact on GEO.
“Statistically, more people are using GEO each day,” said Jenna Fishel, chief commercial officer, First Hospitality. “We wanted to make sure that the hotels have the tools that they can implement and put into action to be ahead of the curve. We wanted to be proactive versus reactive.”
The idea for the GEO Playbook came about when First Hospitality created an AI committee to lead and scale the adoption of AI across its organization, with support from the company’s President and CEO David Duncan, Executive Chairman Sam Schwartz, as well as leadership provided by Chief Technology Officer Jason Segebrecht and Vice President of Business Intelligence and First Analytics Mike Kuzmar. The committee included members from various departments, such as analytics, investments, on-property leadership, human resources, and marketing. “Within this committee, we started to first understand the space and then tried to evaluate the business areas because we have different business leaders in the space and on the committee,” said Alec Schraegle, senior director of digital marketing, First Hospitality. “This is part of where the GEO Playbook came out of. Now that we have a dedicated space to AI, let’s dedicate the resources and the focus to it.”
An Accessible Resource
Especially since the topic may be new to hoteliers, the GEO Playbook is designed to be easy to understand. It also needed to be compatible with all hotel types and operating budgets, offering options at free, low-cost, and higher-level investments to ensure hoteliers can use it to increase their recognizability from AI.
“We wanted to make it almost a one-pager,” Schraegle explained. “We want the GMs being the captains of the ship. We want to make sure that they understand or bought into it. And, obviously, there’s different brands, and major brands are trying to do their own things. We’re trying to understand from those brands and keep in contact with them, because what this playbook ultimately does is fill those gaps.”
“We recognize the brands are taking a step in the right direction, too, but as a hotel management company, we want to differentiate ourselves and path our own path forward when it comes to AI and GEO,” Fishel added.
Measuring Success
Currently, the GEO Playbook is rolled out at 12 hotels to test how it works and gather data.
“We don’t want to roll it out to the entire portfolio because it’s a new program, and we wanted to stress test it,” emphasized Schraegle. “We wanted to make sure that we have different brands involved. We also have different property types; we have full-service, we have premium select-service. We want to see what the response rate would be for different hotel types as well as different market types.”
Feedback about GEO Playbook, both Schraegle and Fishel noted, is positive from the hotels where it’s rolled out, but like search engine optimization (SEO), it’ll take time to see results. It’s also critical for hotels to note the difference between GEO and SEO because they are similar yet have different objectives. SEO’s goal is to drive content so that it’s highly ranked through traditional online search engines, whereas GEO’s goal is to be the source cited by the AI.
“As we see success, it’s going to be more interesting to try to measure GEO versus SEO, because with SEO, there’s proven algorithms or ways to measure it where, when you look at some of these tools—whether it be Gemini or ChatGPT—constantly upgrading their systems and how they work and look at data,” noted Fishel.
