Marriott Is Handing Its Portfolio to the Chatbots, and Says Its Rivals Are Behind

Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano told a Bank of America investor conference on Wednesday that the largest near-term impact of AI on the hotel business will land on distribution, not operations. "The biggest impact you'll see on our industry is the distribution landscape," he said, meaning the way travelers discover and book rooms online.

The company's response has been to feed Google and OpenAI as much content about its properties as it can, so its hotels surface in AI shopping tools in what Capuano called an authentic but prominent way. He cited reports from Skift and Lighthouse indicating that Marriott's portfolio appears in those platforms more readily than any of its peers. Marriott is also running a plain-language search tool inside its own app, Ask Bonvoy, which he said converts at a higher rate, and is testing OpenAI's advertising platform.

Capuano paired the AI comments with July trading numbers. Global RevPAR rose 7% and North America was up 8%, or 5% stripping out World Cup demand. He described the post-pandemic shift of consumer spending toward travel as foundational rather than cyclical.

What it means at the top end

Discovery for a suite at a hotel like a Ritz-Carlton or St. Regis has historically run through travel advisors, loyalty status and brand recall, not through a search ranking. If a chat interface becomes the first place a traveler describes what they want, the brands with the most structured, machine-readable detail about their rooms and restaurants get named first.

That logic also sits behind Capuano's other pitch to owners: attribute-based selling, where individual room types and ancillary services are priced separately rather than bundled into a rate. It is a revenue answer to a summer of owner complaints about fees, and it happens to produce exactly the kind of granular inventory data an AI booking tool can read.