The AI Moment in Travel

By John Andrew Entwistle, Founder & CEO, Wander

A few months ago, a property manager customer sent me a screenshot I still think about.

He'd asked ChatGPT to find him a place to stay in Miami for a long weekend. Not Google. Not Airbnb. ChatGPT. Four seconds later it handed him a shortlist, a reason for each pick and a link to book.

His property wasn't on it.

His competitor's was. Same neighborhood, same price and honestly a worse property. The difference wasn't the home. It was that their site was built to be read by an AI, not just a human.

That's the moment I want to talk about. And here's the thing..: it's not coming. It's already here.

The channel shift nobody sent a memo about

Here's the number that should be on every operator's dashboard right now: 37% of travelers are already using LLMs to research or book their trips. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. These stopped being novelties. They're becoming the front door to travel, the same way Google was in 2005 and Instagram was in 2015.

And just like those shifts, the operators who move early don't get a small edge. They get most of the channel, mostly to themselves, for a while.

We've watched this up close. Wander has worked with 2,500 property management companies as they've scaled from zero to a combined $100M in annual bookings. 72% of that is direct, and a growing share of that direct revenue is being driven by AI-optimized presence, not paid ads or OTA placement. The hosts who show up when someone asks an LLM "where should I stay" are quietly building the highest-margin, most durable channel in the business: direct bookings that didn't cost them 15-20% off the top. 

This isn't a marketing trend. It's a complete distribution shift. And distribution shifts reward the operators who understand the mechanics early.

Why AI ignores most listing sites and what "being seen" actually means now

If you've ever wondered why your beautiful website never shows up when someone asks an AI about your market, it's usually not a design problem. It's a legibility problem.

LLMs don't browse your site the way a guest does. They read structure. Which means:

• Structured data (JSON-LD) that tells an AI exactly what your property is, where it is, what it costs, and what makes it different. Not buried in a PDF or an image carousel.

• Crawlable HTML, not a JavaScript-rendered black box that looks great to a human and looks like nothing to a bot.

• Theme and destination pages that answer the actual questions travelers are asking an AI ("best pet-friendly stay near the beach in Miami")  rather than one generic homepage trying to be everything to everyone.

This is what we call AEO/GEO: Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization. Basically SEO's successor. You're not trying to rank for a search query anymore. You're trying to be the source the AI cites inside its answer. Get it right and the AI doesn't just mention you. It recommends you. Your brand, your booking link, your terms.

Our customers are seeing a 66% average increase in LLM mentions and citations for sites built on WanderOS. And this is just the baseline. We’re pouring tons of company resources into accelerating this as fast as possible.

Get it wrong, and you're invisible in the fastest-growing booking channel in travel, no matter how good your property actually is.

Introducing: The AI Moment in Travel

Starting this week, we're launching a weekly series — articles and short video, right here and across our channels — built entirely around one goal: making Wander the best resource on the internet for operators who want AI-driven direct bookings.

Why we're doing this

Wander exists to help operators own their guest relationship instead of renting it from an OTA every single booking. That mission doesn't change because the front door moved from a search bar to a chat window. Honestly, it gets more urgent.

The operators who treat this like 2010-era SEO, as in "I'll deal with it once it's mainstream," are gonna spend the next three years wondering why their direct bookings went flat while the operator two doors down quietly became "the one ChatGPT recommends."

I'd rather that be you.

See you next week!

— John Andrew Enwistle, Founder & CEO, Wander