A Major Hotel Owner Wants AI Bots Kept Away From His Rooms

Tyler Morse, chairman and chief executive of MCR Hotels, told the Skift Commerce Summit in New York on Wednesday that he would like to stop AI booking agents from reserving rooms at his hotels. His reasoning, as reported by Skift, is commercial rather than technical. Human guests can be tempted by upgrades, packages and other add-ons during the booking process, but a piece of software executing a narrow instruction is far harder to upsell. Morse acknowledged, however, that he does not yet know how a hotel company could actually enforce such a block.

The difficulty is visible in the industry’s own websites. Skift looked at 50 hotel brand sites and found that only 10 explicitly address AI crawlers in their robots.txt files, the instructions that tell automated visitors what they may and may not access. That leaves most hotel brands without even a basic stated policy toward the agents that are starting to search and book on travelers’ behalf. United Airlines went further the same day, announcing that it would block third-party AI bots from booking its flights.

Morse also offered a view of where AI-driven travel shopping is heading. He expects paid placement inside AI recommendations to look much like sponsored links in search results today, and he expects online travel agencies to come out ahead on the margin because of their large customer bases and technology budgets. That matters for independent and franchised hotels: he noted that about 42,000 owners control roughly 65,000 U.S. hotels, so most operators lack the research and tech spending of the big platforms.

For travelers, the immediate effect is limited, but the direction is worth watching. If you use an AI assistant to plan trips, some hotels may begin refusing its bookings, and the rates or packages it finds may differ from what you would see booking directly. Skift Research has estimated global hotel distribution costs at about $105 billion for 2023, much of it paid to intermediaries, which helps explain why hotels are wary of handing another layer of control to software agents.

Sources: Skift