Wyndham has done something most hotel groups are still too nervous to do. It has stopped treating AI booking agents as a threat to manage and started treating them as customers to serve. I think that is the right call, and I think the brands sitting behind loyalty walls waiting for agents to come to them are taking the bigger risk.
On its third-quarter earnings call, Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti called AI assistants “a new type of guest”, according to Skift’s report. He named Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, Instinct and other assistants that can now search and book Wyndham hotels for a traveller. Wyndham feeds rates and availability straight to those agents from its central reservation system, and its booking engine is live inside Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT and Claude.
His line on why was simple: “If we could offer a direct booking path that an AI agent can execute on easily, then we capture that guest.”
Open beats walled, for now
Morgan Stanley, which published a 110-page report on agentic AI in lodging on 12 October, labels Wyndham’s approach “wide open, multiple LLMs”. It describes Marriott and Hilton as “direct-first, loyalty-led”. On paper, the big two look safer. They have the larger loyalty programmes, and Morgan Stanley models them moving 4 percentage points of bookings away from online travel agencies by 2028, against 2.5 points for Wyndham.
I would not read too much into that gap. Loyalty-led only works if the agent knows to look for you and can actually finish the booking. An assistant that hits friction does not wait. It books the next option, and in many cases that next option is an OTA that has already wired itself in. I made a similar point about Hilton’s AI agent problem earlier this month. Being big does not help if you are hard to transact with.
Wyndham’s bet is that being easy to book matters more than being famous. For a group built on Super 8, La Quinta and roadside hotels, where the guest is often choosing on price and location rather than brand love, that is exactly the right bet.
The maths is the real story
Here is the part that should make every hotel CFO pay attention. Morgan Stanley puts OTA commissions at 10% to 20%, compared with roughly 5% for a booking on the brand’s own website. If an AI agent can book through the brand’s own system, that booking looks a lot more like brand.com than it does like Expedia.
That is why I keep saying AI agents are not just a new channel. They are a chance to reset distribution costs. We saw the other side of this with Meta wanting a cut of travel bookings. Platforms will charge. The question is whether the hotel is in the room when the price gets set, or whether an intermediary gets there first.
Wyndham is clearly trying to be in the room. That matters more than any single assistant’s traffic today, which Ballotti admits is still light. He wants the plumbing ready before any surge. Good. As I argued when hotels were waiting for AI bookings to grow, the deals get done long before the volume turns up.
The voice numbers are the proof
If you think this is all slideware, look at what Wyndham has already done with AI on the phone. Ballotti said its AI voice software is in more than 1,700 hotels, has answered over 3 million calls this year, books at an average 15% above the published rate, and has lifted the share of direct bookings by more than 5 percentage points.
That is the pattern I would expect to repeat with agents. Answer the question quickly, have the inventory ready, close the booking, and you win business that would otherwise have leaked to someone else. None of it is magic. It is just being available at the moment of decision.
Where I think Wyndham could be wrong
Ballotti also argued that travellers will tell their agents to honour Wyndham Rewards, so membership becomes a search filter. Morgan Stanley thinks the opposite: that Wyndham’s smaller loyalty programme makes it less likely to capture the savings.
On this one, I side more with the analysts. Most people will not ask an agent for a specific loyalty scheme. They will ask for somewhere clean, close and cheap. As I wrote about interchangeable brands and loyalty, AI rewards whatever makes you different and punishes sameness. Points alone will not do that job.
That does not undo the strategy. It just means Wyndham’s edge comes from being open and easy to book, not from the loyalty card.
What other hotels should take from this
You do not need Wyndham’s scale to copy the thinking. Make sure your rates and availability can be read and booked by machines, not just by people on your website. Know which assistants can reach your inventory today and which cannot. And stop waiting for a clean traffic report before you act, because by the time AI bookings are big enough to measure easily, the terms will already be set.
So here is the debate. Is Wyndham’s open-door approach smarter than Marriott and Hilton’s loyalty-led caution, or is it handing too much power to the platforms? I think open wins this round, at least for brands that compete on price and location. Where do you stand?
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