You already know how to make a guest feel expected.
The guest-path and AI visibility audit is a plain-language document that follows your guest from the first question to Google or ChatGPT to the booking, and shows where the path breaks and what mends it.
The name remembered at check-in. The bakery that opens on Sunday, written on the back of a card. The receptionist who knows which table, at which restaurant, for that particular couple. That's the job, and you do it well. Keep it exactly as it is.
Your guest looks for a hotel at eleven at night, on a phone, maybe in a language that isn't yours.
Is your hotel on the shortlist when they ask Google or ChatGPT for a recommendation? And when they land on your site, what do they see that nobody at the front desk ever sees?
I take their seat and follow the same path.
The question they type, the answer the AI gives them, the page they land on, the room they choose, the moment they book. I see what they see.
A document that helps. Not one that grades.
Two kinds of observation. What I saw, the way your guest would have seen it. And how the machines see you: whether AI search puts you on the list, and what it says about you when it does.
For each one: where the path is smooth, where it stumbles, and what restores it. In plain words, so whoever looks after your website can act on it directly.
A composite observation, drawn from several real paths. No hotel is named.
Put in your own numbers. Nobody sees them but you.
The figures filled in belong to an invented hotel. Replace them with yours: everything is calculated on this page, and nothing you type leaves your device.
What is half a point of conversion worth to you?
You know your big numbers by heart: occupancy, ADR. But the share of website visitors who actually book is reported as a decimal, and slips by. Yet every visitor who gets lost in a broken path, a language that switches, a booking engine that doesn't speak like your house, is a guest who already chose to look at you.
Sources: Christine Malfair, hotel marketer and former GM (LinkedIn, 9 Sep 2026). Most independent hotels convert 1.0–2.0% of website visitors; the strongest run past 3%. h2c Global IBE Study 2020 (76 hotel chains): 1.1% of website visits booked in 2015, 1.9% in 2019.
Example numbers, replace with yours
- —extra direct bookings per year
- —direct revenue at your target
- —what those same bookings would cost in OTA commission
| + a quarter point | — |
| + half a point | — |
| + one full point | — |
The audit follows your guest's path, domestic and foreign, from the first question to the booking engine, and shows where it breaks. Every repaired break is part of this decimal.
Talk it through with Sonja →How many public conversations do you leave hanging?
A review is not feedback. It is your most public, most permanent marketing channel. Future guests read your replies as closely as the reviews themselves, and a personal reply to a critical review can raise trust. Silence confirms the bad experience.
The effect is measured. Hotels that start answering their reviews see their rating rise by about 0.12 stars and receive 12% more reviews (Proserpio & Zervas). 77% of travellers say a personal reply makes them more likely to book (TripAdvisor with Ipsos MORI). And a better score carries a price: one point more on a five-point scale let a hotel charge about 11% more and keep the same chance of being chosen (Cornell). The bar: most reviews answered personally, within 48 hours.
Sources: Proserpio & Zervas, Marketing Science 36(5), 2017 · TripAdvisor with Ipsos MORI, 23,292 travellers in 12 markets, May–June 2019 (hotels and restaurants together) · Anderson, Cornell Hospitality Report 12(15), 2012, 13,341 Travelocity reservations.
Example numbers, replace with yours
- —unanswered reviews every week
Against the 48-hour bar—
The audit reads your reviews and your replies the way a future guest does, in every language they arrive in, and names what is worth answering first.
Then: what a returning guest is worth →Your website, your agency and your booking system stay in the same hands.
Nothing is replaced; what is missing is added.
A guest who understands every page they touch, without changing language along the way.
A booking that finishes where it began: with you, not with the platform that understood them first.
Let's look through your guest's eyes.
Tell me which hotel. I'll reply with one thing I noticed, walking through your site the way your guest would.