Will AI Make Hotel Websites Obsolete? Not Quite, but...

Hospitality Net

a day ago

In my writings over the past decade, I have frequently returned to the notion that artificial intelligence is not merely an additional layer in the technological stack, but rather a reconfiguration of the Internet's ontological architecture. It redefines not only how we book, but also how we come to know, how we choose, and ultimately how we experience. AI is not simply the new interface, it is the new epistemology.
And yet, in the face of this tectonic shift, the assertion that hotel websites are on the verge of obsolescence feels, at best, premature and, at worst, epistemologically superficial.
Let me unpack that.
Some years ago, I proposed that we were witnessing a transition from an HTML-based internet to a generative, semantic web; a post-indexed realm where large language models no longer retrieve content, but actively compose it. This is not a cosmetic enhancement of user experience. It is the dissolution of the interface itself. When I say that "AI is the new UI," it is not a rhetorical flourish, but a forecast grounded in the trajectory of computational cognition. In this emerging paradigm, the user journey is no longer mediated by drop-down menus or carousel sliders, but by intent inference, probabilistic reasoning, and neural prediction.
Within this agentic ecosystem, AI agents will likely communicate directly with a hotel's CRS, PMS, or ARI endpoints through APIs, bypassing the traditional front-end entirely. And, truth to be told, platforms such as Booking.com or Google have already positioned themselves as the primary substrates for these interactions, not because users consciously choose them over other options, but because synthetic agents prefer them. They are structured, annotated, schema-rich environments that are legible to machine intelligence.
This preference is not incidental. In virtually every single test I've done with autonomous travel planning so far, agents consistently bypassed brand.com altogether, defaulting instead to OTAs. The reason is both simple and telling: Booking speaks machine. Your brand.com, most likely, does not.
But this does not mean the hotel website will vanish. Rather, it will mutate.
The nostalgic vision of a potential guest arriving at your homepage, absorbing your brand narrative, exploring a meticulously (hopefully!) crafted UX, and being emotionally moved by persuasive copy still retains symbolic value within human-centric marketing, but it plays almost no role in the decision-making processes of synthetic agents. Agentic AI has no regard for the elegance of your serif fonts. What it seeks is structured rates, inventory metadata, cancellation policy logic, amenity taxonomies, and room categorization defined in schema. org-compliant JSON-LD. That is the syntax of its world.
And that is precisely why the hotel website, while no longer a performative space, remains infrastructurally indispensable.
The generative web still depends on anchors. It cannot synthesize meaning in a vacuum. It must hook into structured information that can be parsed, weighted, and recomposed. Those anchors (your ARI, your review aggregates, your canonical descriptions, your media repositories, your microdata, and, if you dare to innovate, your own autonomous hotel agent) are the raw material from which these models derive knowledge.
And if you fail to provide them, the only handshake your property will offer is with the OTAs (and we all know the cost of that embrace).
So no, hotel websites are not becoming obsolete. They are becoming invisible. If Max's question is whether websites, as we have traditionally known them, will disappear, then the answer is likely yes, and it may happen within this very decade.
However, framed differently, one could argue that they will endure as repositories of structured truths, rather than as stages for aesthetic persuasion. The guest will not see your website, but their agent will inhabit it.
The strategic imperative for hoteliers, therefore, is not to redesign websites for human eyes (or at least not as a first priority) but to reimagine them as machine-readable ecosystems. This means investing in composable architectures, headless CMSs, semantic data layers, and generative model optimization.
In this light, the more pertinent question is not "Will AI make hotel websites obsolete?" but "What is the function of a hotel website in a world where AI sees on our behalf?"
The answer, though stripped of glamour, is simple: to be visible to machines, to be interoperable, to serve as a semantic backbone in an increasingly agentic web.
Not very poetic, I know.
But, I'm afraid, also very true.