AI is making promises your brand never made. Hotels are paying the price

When algorithms and recommendation engines set guest expectations, the brand gets the blame when reality falls short.

For decades, hotels competed on a familiar set of variables: visibility, price, reputation, and conversion. Show up in the right place, with the right offer and the right reviews, and you could win the booking. 

Today, hotels are not just competing for attention. They are operating in a decision ecosystem where customer expectations are shaped long before the brand has any direct influence over them.

Travel discovery is now distributed across a fragmented set of channels. Inspiration happens on social platforms, validation on Google, comparison across aggregators, and booking wherever friction is lowest. Increasingly, AI-generated recommendations and summaries are shaping perception before travelers ever reach a hotel’s own digital front door.

By the time a guest arrives at their destination, much of the experience has already been assembled by platforms, algorithms, reviews, and third parties that hold no responsibility for what happens next. And when reality fails to match the expectation, guests rarely blame the platform or recommendation engine that shaped their perception. They blame the hotel.

This is emerging as one of the defining trust challenges for modern brands: the brand absorbs accountability for expectations it never set. For executives, this is more than a customer experience issue. It is a business risk.

This is where the breakdown happens. Travelers arrive expecting amenities that are unavailable, room types that do not exist, or experiences that were never actually bookable together. A romantic ocean-view suite turns out to be a standard room with a partial view. A recommended restaurant is closed for renovation. A seamless itinerary becomes a series of apologies at check-in.

Guests do not care which disconnected system caused the confusion. They only remember that the brand failed to meet the promise. And increasingly, the consequences extend far beyond a single stay.

In hospitality, loyalty is built on trust and consistency. When guests feel misled — even unintentionally — brands pay through lower return rates, weaker relationships, greater skepticism, and damaging reviews.

This dynamic is not unique to hospitality. It reflects a structural shift in how expectations are formed, transferred, and owned — across every sector.

Retailers face it when products promoted online are unavailable in-store. Patients encounter it when third-party scheduling tools reflect outdated availability. Financial institutions face it when comparison engines frame value before customers ever engage the brand directly. In each case, companies have less control over how their products and experiences are presented before a customer engages directly.

For years, scale was treated as the strategic advantage: the more places a brand appeared, the more likely it was to win demand. But in an AI-mediated, platform-driven environment, visibility without accuracy becomes a liability. The more intermediaries between brands and consumers, the more opportunity there is for distortion between what is promised and what can actually be delivered.

The imperative is no longer simply to be present across channels. It is to ensure that what customers see, infer, and expect is aligned with what the brand can actually deliver. Trust is no longer built solely through brand storytelling. It is built through operational consistency between what is promised in the market and what is delivered in the moment.

Travel simply makes the stakes easier to see because the experience is personal, emotional, and immediate. Guests remember the anniversary dinner that never got booked, the room that did not match the photos, or the feeling that the experience fell short of what they were hoping for.

The companies that lead in this environment will not be the ones with the most reach. They will be the ones that can govern their brand with enough precision to ensure that discovery, expectation, and delivery remain connected.

For hotels, that shift begins with reclaiming control over the fundamentals: content, availability, and the way experiences are structured and represented across channels. Because while demand may now originate anywhere, the responsibility for delivering on it still sits with the brand.

In the AI era, those that actively manage how expectations are created, shaped, and transferred will be better positioned to protect trust, loyalty, and long-term growth. Brands that don’t reclaim that influence risk letting the algorithm write their reputation for them.

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com