Hotel chains keep saying they want to win the AI agent era. Right now, their own websites are handing it to the OTAs.
That is the uncomfortable takeaway from Skift’s report on Hilton and AI booking agents, published on 2 October 2026. BTIG analyst Jake Fuller told clients his team had tested Meta’s personal agent, Muse, on a range of hotel searches. His verdict was blunt: “Hilton blocked Muse.”
Hilton says that is not true. A spokesperson said the company has not blocked Muse or any of the major agentic assistants, and is “accepting bookings from various agents, including Muse.” Fair enough. But whether Hilton meant to shut the door or not barely matters. If the agent cannot get a price, the guest does not get a Hilton booking.
Blocked or broken, the result is the same
Skift ran its own checks. Muse hit problems on the Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt websites. At the Hilton New York Times Square, it reached the room-and-rate step and got a “Something went wrong” error. Logging in with Hilton Honors details did not fix it.
Here is the interesting part. A rival agent called Instinct searched all three brand sites without trouble, and pulled back member-only rates that matched a manual search. So the big chains are not shutting agents out as a rule. Some agents get in. Some do not.
That is exactly the problem. Travellers will not care which agent was “at fault”. If they ask their assistant to book a hotel in New York and one brand site throws an error, the agent will simply go somewhere that works. Usually, that means Booking.com or Expedia.
The OTAs do not need to win this. Hotels just need to keep losing it
Fuller’s wider point is the one hoteliers should argue about. He thinks AI agents are more likely to become a customer acquisition channel for OTAs than a threat to them. Why? Because OTAs hold huge amounts of inventory, pricing and availability data in one place. An agent can use that far faster than crawling hotel sites one at a time.
Now compare that with what Hilton’s leaders are saying. Chief information officer Michael Leidinger said this week that large language models put OTAs “under real threat” for the first time. Chief executive Chris Nassetta told Skift Global Forum that personal agents are “where the world’s going.”
Both things can be true. AI agents could weaken the OTAs. But only if hotel websites are as easy for a machine to book as an OTA is. Today, in these tests at least, they are not.
We have seen this film before. When Google Hotels stumbled, it was Expedia, Tripadvisor and the other intermediaries that picked up the slack, not the brands. The intermediaries are simply better at being findable and bookable at scale. If hotels treat agent access as a side project, history will repeat itself, only faster.
Your website now has two audiences
For twenty years, hotel websites have been built for humans with a mouse. Pretty photos, clever date pickers, pop-ups for the loyalty scheme, and a booking engine bolted on from a third party. Agents do not care about any of that. They need clean, stable pages, clear rates, and a booking path that does not break the moment something unexpected happens.
That links straight back to the point we made last week: hotels have bought plenty of AI, but the messy data and manual work underneath have not gone away. Agents expose that mess very quickly. A human might shrug off a slow page and try again. An agent will just move on.
It also echoes what Airbnb is doing. As we argued in our take on Airbnb’s AI search, the winners will be the brands that control clean, structured data about what they sell. That is a website and tech job as much as a marketing one.
What I would do if I ran digital for a hotel group
- Test your own booking flow with the main AI agents every month. Not once. Every month. Write down where they fail, just as you would track rankings.
- Stop treating bots as the enemy by default. Bot protection still matters, but separate the scrapers you want to stop from the agents you want to welcome.
- Make rates and room details easy to read. Structured data, simple rate tables and stable URLs help agents, search engines and humans at the same time.
- Put someone in charge of it. Agent access sits between IT, revenue, distribution and marketing. If nobody owns it, nobody fixes it.
- Budget for it now. If you are planning spend, fold agent readiness into the same thinking as how a travel CMO should prioritise SEO budget. It is the same discipline with a new kind of visitor.
The debate worth having
Hotel chains love to say direct booking is the priority. Fine. But in an agent-led world, “direct” only means something if your site actually works for the agent. Otherwise you are inviting guests to book direct, then quietly sending their AI assistant to the OTA down the road.
So here is my challenge to hotel marketers: is your website ready for a customer that is not a person? If you are not sure, you already have your answer, and the OTAs are counting on it.
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