News & analysis
Big Travel Brands Own AI Search, But Not Everywhere
New BrightEdge research shows major travel brands dominate ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews for booking and comparison queries, while inspiration-related searches leave room for Reddit, YouTube, and other smaller sites.
By Roomer Editorial · · 3 min read
What did BrightEdge find about AI search and travel brands?
BrightEdge tracked how often specific brands appear in AI-generated answers on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews for travel queries. The firm calls this "share of voice" rather than rankings, since AI answers don't produce the kind of linked results list that classic search does.
The headline finding: familiar brand names win most categories on both platforms. American Airlines, Royal Caribbean, and Expedia each lead their category on both Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
Booking intent matters too. Only 9% of tracked Google AI Overviews prompts fall into the booking-intent category, but when they do, a booking platform shows up in 38% of those answers, compared with 12% for inspiration prompts.
Price-related searches amplify that pattern. Booking platforms appear in 78% of AI Overviews answers containing words like "cheap," "deal," "budget," or "last-minute," versus 17% of other answers. Expedia alone shows up in 44% of those budget-focused answers.
Which brands dominate which categories?
The leaderboard shifts depending on the category, but it's still a leaderboard of recognizable names.
Hotels split by platform: Hilton leads Google AI Overviews at 28.3% visibility, while Marriott leads ChatGPT at 29.4%. Neither engine agrees on a single hotel winner.
Airlines don't split. American Airlines leads both, at 26.6% on Google AI Overviews and 25.3% on ChatGPT, with a 6.1-point gap over United on AI Overviews and a 9.1-point gap on ChatGPT.
Cruise lines follow the same pattern as airlines. Royal Caribbean leads both platforms, at 24.8% and 28.8%. Royal Caribbean and Carnival both show stronger visibility in the ChatGPT sample, while Viking shows up less.
Expedia's edge over Kayak shows how lopsided a single matchup can get: 2.2x on Google AI Overviews (31.3% vs 14.4%) and 1.4x on ChatGPT.
Where do smaller sites have an opening?
Inspiration queries, the kind built on subjective, human-experience content. BrightEdge's data shows inspiration and comparison together account for most of the tracked panel, but they don't behave the same way.
Platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and AAA show up more often in inspiration questions. Hotels and cruise lines show up more in comparison questions. Booking platforms concentrate in the booking-intent slice, which is the smallest of the three.
BrightEdge doesn't explain why big brands underperform on subjective, experience-based queries. The article's working theory is that this kind of query isn't what big brands are built to answer. A theme park brand site isn't optimized to answer "is this hotel actually worth it," but a creator who stayed there is.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is the opening, not the headline. Roomer Editorial's view: if you're a travel creator publishing on your own site, don't chase booking-intent keywords where Expedia and Marriott already own the answer box. You won't out-rank a brand that already owns the category, with a site built entirely around transactions.
Go after the inspiration and comparison layer instead. That's the territory where AI models are already pulling from Reddit threads and YouTube reviews because the brands aren't publishing that kind of content at scale. A creator who's actually stayed at a property, flown a route, or taken a specific excursion has something no airline's SEO team can fake: a lived, subjective take.
Roomer Editorial's view: the structural advantage here is ownership. A creator posting that same hotel review on their own site, with bookable pages tied to the video, builds a page that can get indexed and surfaced for exactly the inspiration queries BrightEdge flags as open territory. On Roomer, that means your own travel site built from your videos, with booking rails through Vio, Stay22, GetYourGuide, Viator, and Klook, and 100% of commissions when someone books through your own site. Posting the same video to a platform you don't own doesn't get you the same long-term search presence.
The caution: don't assume any of this scales to budget or "cheap" searches. That's exactly the segment where booking platforms already dominate 78% of the answers. Spend your effort where AI search still rewards a human voice, not where it's already decided the answer is Expedia.
One move worth making this month: audit your existing video library for anything that answers a subjective "is it worth it" or "what's it really like" question, and get that content live on a page you own before someone else's generic listicle claims the spot.
Source: BrightEdge — Holiday Travel in AI Search: The Travel Brands AI Puts on Its List
