Wyndham Wants Chatbots to Book Your Hotel Room Directly

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts is courting AI booking agents in a push to win more direct bookings, CEO Geoff Ballotti said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. Its booking engine is live in Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT and Claude, and its central reservation system supplies rates and availability to agents such as Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, Skift reports.

The logic is about commissions. Morgan Stanley puts online travel agency commissions at 10% to 20%, versus about 5% for bookings made on a brand’s own site. The firm models Wyndham moving 2.5 percentage points of bookings away from online travel agencies by 2028 with a half-point cut in commission costs, and a 4-point shift for Marriott and Hilton, which it calls more direct-first and loyalty-led.

Wyndham is also using AI on the phone. Its voice software runs in more than 1,700 hotels, has answered over 3 million calls this year and books at an average 15% above the published rate, Ballotti said, adding that it has raised the direct-booking share by more than 5 percentage points.

Results were solid. U.S. revenue per available room rose 6%, ahead of the company’s second-half forecast, helped by construction crews on per diems at roughly 350 data-center projects near about 1,000 Wyndham hotels. For travelers, the takeaway is that asking an AI assistant to find a room may increasingly lead straight to a hotel’s own booking path rather than a third-party site.

Sources: Skift