Sun’s Out, Summer Travel is On, and AI is the new favorite Trip Planner
School's out, bags are packed, and summer travel is in full swing. But here's something that might surprise you: 40% of those travelers are using AI as their new favorite trip planner. They're not Googling your destination or hospitality brand. They're opening ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini and asking for a recommendation. And they're getting a curated answer before your brand ever gets a chance to make an impression.
If your brand isn't showing up in those answers, you're invisible to a fast-growing segment of high-intent consumers. Deloitte reports that 68% of retailers plan to deploy agentic AI within 24 months, and that's just the operational side. The consumer-facing shift is happening faster and with less fanfare. When someone asks an AI assistant, “What's the best restaurant district in Washington, DC?” or “Find me a shopping center near Atlanta”, these AI platforms return a curated answer based on the content they were trained on and can access. Brands with strong, structured, findable content in the right places show up. Everyone else doesn't. This is what generative engine optimization (GEO) is about: the emerging discipline of ensuring your brand is discoverable and credible within AI-generated responses, not just traditional search results.
Key Takeaways:
40% of travelers use AI to research experiences before visiting any brand website, and that share is growing fast.
AI assistants are becoming the primary discovery layer between consumers and brands, and not a supplement to search, but a replacement for it.
Traditional SEO is no longer enough. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the emerging discipline that ensures AI surfaces your brand.
Why It Matters to our Clients:
For commercial real estate brands, including developers, operators, retailers, and hospitality concepts, this is an urgent visibility issue. The consumers who will choose your property, visit your tenants, or book a stay at your hotel are increasingly using AI to make those decisions before they ever reach your website. If your digital content strategy is still built around ranking on page one of Google, you're optimizing for a behavior that's already changing. The brands that will win discovery in 2027 and beyond are the ones building credible, structured, authoritative content that AI systems can find, understand, and recommend. That means rethinking how you write about your properties and tenants, where that content lives, how it's structured, and how consistently it's published. It also means building genuine third-party credibility through press coverage, reviews, and mentions in authoritative publications, which AI systems weigh heavily. This isn't a future opportunity. It's a 2026 opportunity. And the brands that start now will have a compounding advantage over those waiting for the trend to fully mature.
