The rise of conversational AI is shaking up the rules of visibility for hotels and restaurants.
Hospitality and catering: faced with the crisis, AI infrastructure is no longer an option
20% drop in activity today, 62% drop in reservations for this summer: the hotel and catering industry is bearing the brunt of the effects of the crisis in the Middle East. It hardly needed this new episode, as the sector is experiencing structural difficulties: the number of business failures increased by 62.6% between 2022 and 2024.
In this context, hoteliers and restaurateurs must carry out a fundamental transformation. They can no longer rely solely on traditional sales and marketing methods: they must now integrate AI at the heart of their local visibility and acquisition strategy.
The end of keyword SEO
More than 35% of consumers now rely on tools guided byartificial intelligence to choose a hotel or restaurant. Faced with this ultra-rapid transition in uses, traditional algorithms are giving way to intelligent agents who no longer analyze keywords, but ecosystems of structured data, which outline the overall reputation of each establishment. Result: anyone whose information is fragmented or poorly translated for these tools simply becomes invisible to the user.
Some giants in the sector have already made this change. Domino’s Pizza leverages data collected across its digital ecosystem to refine its promotional strategies, with a measured 20% increase in customer engagement. Hard Rock Cafe, for its part, uses AI to analyze the semantics of local customer feedback on a global scale, allowing its establishments to be natively indexed and recommended by virtual assistants when they search for a table according to specific local criteria.
French hoteliers and restaurateurs can draw inspiration from these examples. To reverse the trend, professionals must rethink their online presence no longer as a succession of static pages, but as a universal semantic infrastructure. This is the challenge of moving from traditional local SEO to optimization for artificial intelligence. For a hotel or restaurant to be recommended by a virtual agent, the absolute accuracy of its data
and the freshness of its customer reviews must be natively guaranteed. The risks of AI hallucinating when faced with unstructured or obsolete data represent an immediate shortfall.
A fundamental switch, not a simple technological tool
What the examples of Domino’s Pizza and Hard Rock Cafe demonstrate illustrates less a technological feat than a radical change in posture. These brands no longer treat customer reviews as reputational data to be monitored, nor operational data as a simple internal management tool: they consider them as raw material to be transformed continuously, in real time, to feed a language understandable by AI models.
It is precisely this shift that the sector must make. Many still manage their reviews and business listings on an ad hoc and manual basis, with tools designed for yesterday’s web. But the new situation requires continuous verification, automated structuring and instantaneous dissemination of information across all points of contact where AI agents come to seek their answers. It is no longer an occasional community management subject, but a full-fledged data infrastructure, which must operate autonomously and reliably, without burdening the teams in the field.
Beyond immediate survival in the face of economic slowdown, the adoption of strategies based on AI infrastructure represents a robust return on investment lever for the sector. The first results observed among professionals who have migrated to these semantic visibility models demonstrate this. By guaranteeing perfect visibility of their offer to new research entry points, hoteliers and restaurateurs regain control of their distribution. Artificial intelligence, far from distancing the customer relationship, is becoming the most effective intermediary to bring the consumer back into the physical world. Faced with the decline in activity, technological immobility is the only risk that the sector cannot afford to take.
NICOLAS MARETTE, FOUNDER OF CUSTPLACE.
