Travel SEO: how hotels, holiday lets, transport and tour businesses get found in search and AI

Travel is one of the most contested areas of search. The biggest online travel agencies spend billions a year on marketing, most of it on search. Booking Holdings reported performance and brand marketing costs of $8.2 billion in 2025, with performance marketing mostly spent on search engines, primarily Google, plus affiliates, metasearch and social media.¹ Google runs its own hotel, flight and activity products inside its results, and AI assistants now plan trips and, in some markets, take bookings. Independent hotels, holiday let managers, transport operators and tour companies compete in the same space with a fraction of the budget.

This guide covers how that space is divided up and what each kind of travel business can do in it. It starts with the business types and where each competes, then works through Google's travel modules and how to get into them, inventory and destination pages at scale, prices and structured data, expiring inventory, international sites, seasonality, content, UK consumer law, AI trip planning and measurement. Hotels should read it alongside the local SEO guide, because a hotel is a local business first. Multi-market sites need the international SEO guide too, and the AI search guide goes further into how assistants find and cite sources.

For context on where I am writing from: I worked agency-side at PACIFIC from 2021 to 2023, in a UK team on Expedia Group's transportation line of business. Nothing in this guide draws on that client's data, results or strategy. Everything here comes from public documentation, regulators, published research and my own judgement, and the citations say which is which.

Travel SEO advice often assumes one kind of business, usually a large online travel agency with millions of pages. Most travel businesses are nothing like that. The work depends on what you sell, whether you hold the inventory yourself, and which of Google's surfaces your inventory is eligible for. Start by placing yourself in one of these groups.

Suppliers and intermediaries need each other

A hotel competing against the OTAs that sell its rooms is the oldest tension in travel search, and it is not a simple fight. In 2009 Chris Anderson of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration studied four properties run by JHM Hotels and found that being listed on Expedia produced extra reservations through the hotels' own channels of 7.5 to 26 percent, on top of the bookings made on Expedia itself.² He called it the billboard effect. It is a small and old study, so treat the size of the effect with caution, but the mechanism still applies: travellers find a property on a marketplace and then go looking for it by name. That branded search is where a hotel's own site has to win.

The OTAs feel the same pull in the other direction. Booking Holdings reported that in 2025 a mid-fifties percentage of its room nights came from consumers arriving directly on its platforms, and that this direct mix improved its marketing efficiency.¹ Every travel business, large or small, is trying to turn paid and borrowed traffic into people who come back by name. Organic search sits in the middle of that: it is where people look you up, and where generic searches can be won without paying per click.

What each type should take from this guide

• Hotels: chapters 2 and 3 on getting into the hotel module, chapter 5 on price consistency, chapter 10 on pricing law, and the local SEO guide.
• Holiday let managers: chapter 3 on vacation rental eligibility, chapter 4 on property and area pages, chapter 10 on total prices including cleaning fees and local taxes.
• OTAs, metasearch and car hire brokers: chapters 4 to 7 on inventory pages, expiring stock and international sites, then chapter 12 on measurement.
• Tour and activity operators: chapter 3 on Things to do, chapter 5 on event and trip markup, chapter 9 on content.
• Destination guides and tourism boards: chapters 8, 9 and 11, because informational searches are the ones most exposed to AI answers.

Google treats travel differently from most other searches. For hotels, flights and things to do it runs its own interfaces, filled with structured data from partners, alongside the ordinary web results. Understanding which parts of a travel results page are filled from feeds and which from crawled pages tells you where your effort goes.

Hotel results

Hotel results on Search and Maps are sorted by relevance by default, using dozens of factors that include the search terms, location, price, and user ratings and reviews. They can be personalised using recent searches and, for signed-in users, previous bookings.³ Hotel Center's FAQ for owners puts the ranking of the hotels themselves in local terms, relevance, distance and prominence, and says there is no way to buy a better position, though the quality of information about the hotel can affect it.⁴ That is the same framework as local search, which is why a hotel's Business Profile matters as much as its website.

Inside each hotel's listing sit booking options: who can sell you a room, at what price. Paid hotel ads appear first with an Ads badge and are ranked by auction. Free booking links follow, ranked on consumer preference, landing page experience and the historical accuracy of the prices the partner has sent. Prices come from partner sites and can vary by device, sign-in status or audience.³ Value offered to the user also counts, and a partner's commercial relationship with Google has no effect on free booking link ranking. Nobody can pay for a higher position there.⁵

Vacation rental results

Holiday lets appear in a separate vacation rentals experience. It is open to registered property management businesses with a direct booking website, or to properties listed on a booking site that is integrated with it. Individually owned rentals are not eligible at the time of writing.⁶ For an independent owner, that means the route onto Google's rental results runs through the platforms and managers they already list with.

Google Flights

Google Flights compares offers from more than 300 travel partners, including airlines, online travel agencies and aggregators. Partners do not pay to appear and the order is not influenced by Google's relationships with them. Results come in two tabs: Best, which balances price, convenience and ease of booking, and Cheapest, which includes extra itineraries from travel agents. When ordering booking links, the system considers price, link quality and whether the link is an airline or an OTA. On that last point Google is unusually frank: its data shows users prefer airline links, and it aims to show both airline and OTA options among the top results.⁷ For an airline, the lever is fare data reaching Flights. For an OTA, it is price and link quality.

Things to do

Things to do covers attraction admission tickets, tours and activities. Partners can show their inventory through free listings and through a paid ad format.⁸ Operators can add ticket and activity details to their own Business Profile, with a name and a booking URL as the required fields, and admission details from connectivity partners show before the operator's own.⁹ Chapter 3 covers the choice between those routes.

Events, AI Overviews and the ordinary web results

Event listings on Search and Maps are fed by Event structured data on the organiser's or ticket seller's pages, in a list of supported countries that includes the UK and the US. Events must be bookable by the general public, purely virtual events with no real-world part are not supported, and each event needs its own URL.¹⁰ This is one of the few travel features filled from your own markup.

Around all of this sit the ordinary organic results and, increasingly, AI Overviews. Ofcom's Online Nation report for 2025 put the share of UK searches showing an AI Overview at about 30%, and found that 53% of UK adults say they see these summaries often.¹¹ Informational travel searches, such as what to do in a city or when to visit somewhere, are the ones an AI summary can answer on the page. Chapter 9 deals with what that means for content.

Most travel modules are filled from data you send, directly or through a partner. A perfect website does not put a hotel's rates into its Google listing. This chapter is the plumbing, and for hotels, rental managers and tour operators it is often the highest-return work in this guide.

Hotels

To count as a hotel on Google, a property must accept overnight guests, have a front desk and a manager or owner on site, and have its business address and name listed publicly. Inns, B&Bs, motels and resorts can qualify.¹² Hotel Center's starter guide splits participants into hotel owners, connectivity partners (OTAs, metasearch engines, booking engines and similar systems that manage rates for many properties), agencies and vacation rental partners.⁶ Existing Hotel Center partners running hotel ads are eligible for free booking links automatically, as long as a property has a bid, available rates and a landing page.⁵

For an independent hotel, the usual route is to verify the Business Profile and then have the booking engine or channel manager, acting as a connectivity partner, send live rates and availability to Google. Ask your booking engine provider whether they do this and what it costs before you sign anything. Once rates are flowing, a link to the hotel's own site can carry an Official site badge, which goes to hotel owners, direct suppliers, central reservation systems and integration partners, never to OTAs, and to only one partner per hotel.¹³

Price accuracy is where most hotel integrations quietly fail. Under Hotel Center's Price Accuracy Policy, the total price on the booking page must be prominently displayed and match the total shown on Google, and taxes and fees must cover every mandatory charge collected by the partner or the hotel. Poor accuracy lowers the placement of free booking links, and persistent problems lead to suspension of a hotel or a whole account.¹⁴ Common causes are a booking engine that adds a fee at the last step, a rate that needs a login, or a currency conversion that has gone stale.

Holiday let managers

Vacation rental partners are registered property management businesses with direct booking capability, or booking sites integrated with Google's rental results.⁶ Landing pages have rules of their own: a booking link must land on a property details page showing the requested dates and price, or on a results list with that property first and highlighted. A direct link must show the property name, occupancy, description, photos, reviews where available, and booking links without the user having to do more than scroll.¹⁵ If your direct site cannot meet those requirements, fix that before applying.

Tour and activity operators

Operators have two routes into Things to do. The simple one is adding ticket or activity details to the Business Profile, which is open to all attraction businesses and tour operators that follow the Things to do policies.⁹ The fuller one is through a connectivity partner, usually the reservation system you already use, which can send products, prices and availability. For individual operators, working with a connectivity partner is strongly recommended over integrating directly.⁸ Ask your booking system whether it is an approved partner before you look elsewhere.

Large travel sites are built from templates: a page per destination, per property, per route, per airport, per activity. Done well, this is the most useful thing a travel site offers, because each page answers a specific question with specific inventory. Done badly, it produces thousands of near-identical pages that differ only in the place name, and search engines have a name for those.

Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as creating pages to rank for specific, similar queries that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination. Their examples include multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.¹⁶ The same policies cover scaled content abuse: many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings, whether by AI tools, scraping feeds or stitching together content from other pages without adding value.¹⁶ A travel site that generates a page for every town in the country with a car hire search box and a paragraph of rewritten text matches both definitions.

The test for each page type

The question for any templated page is whether it would be useful to a traveller who landed on it with no search engine involved. That depends on what data the template can fill in. I use a simple rule: a page type is worth publishing at scale only if, for most of the places it covers, it carries at least one thing the traveller needs that the neighbouring page does not.

Supplier feed descriptions deserve a special warning. Hotel and activity descriptions syndicated through feeds appear word for word on every site that takes the feed. Publishing them as your property page adds a page to the web that already exists dozens of times. Use the feed for facts and write or generate summaries that add something: what the reviews say about noise, how far the property really is from the station, which room types suit families.

Build a quality gate into the template

Programmatic pages need rules that stop a page being published or indexed when its data is too thin. Set a minimum for each page type: for example, a destination page needs at least a set number of available properties and some reviews, a route page needs an operator and a timetable, and a car hire location page needs at least one supplier with a desk there. Pages below the bar either stay out of the sitemap with a noindex, or are not generated at all. Location pages that are not doorway pages goes through the same test for service businesses, and which faceted navigation pages to index covers the filters (star rating, price band, amenities) that multiply travel URLs. The site's free Programmatic skill for AI coding agents builds pages from a dataset behind exactly this kind of gate and refuses to produce pages that differ only by a swapped place name.

Travel pages carry a lot of facts that change hourly: prices, availability, dates. Structured data can describe those facts, but it does less for travel in Google's results than many people expect. Know which markup does what before you invest in it.

What markup does and does not do for travel

• Hotel prices in Google's hotel results come from the partners that supply rates to Google.³ The route for a price into the hotel listing is a rate connection, so adding an Offer with a price to a hotel page does not do that job.
• Schema.org has a full vocabulary for accommodation: Hotel sits under LodgingBusiness, which is a kind of LocalBusiness, and carries properties such as checkinTime, checkoutTime, amenityFeature, numberOfRooms, petsAllowed and starRating.¹⁷ Using it describes the property accurately to any system that reads it, which is worth doing, but it is not a ticket into a Google feature.
• Google's vacation rental structured data is limited to sites already working with a Google Technical Account Manager and with access to Hotel Center. It requires, among other things, a unique identifier, at least eight photos, precise latitude and longitude, and occupancy details.¹⁸ The schema.org VacationRental type itself is open to anyone.¹⁹
• Event markup is the one travel-adjacent feature filled from your own pages. Required properties are the name, start date and location with an address.¹⁰ Schema.org's eventStatus property lets you mark an event as cancelled, postponed, rescheduled or moved online.²⁰
• For tours, schema.org has TouristTrip, an itinerary of visits to tourist attractions or destinations with properties for the itinerary, the audience and offers. Schema.org marks it as still in development.²¹ There is no Google rich result for it, so use it only if you want to describe tours for other consumers of the data.

A minimal, honest Hotel block looks like this. Everything in it is visible on the page, and it carries no price because the price depends on dates the page has not been given.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Hotel",
  "name": "Harbour View Hotel",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Quay Street",
    "addressLocality": "Whitby",
    "postalCode": "YO21 1AA",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": 54.48612, "longitude": -0.61442 },
  "telephone": "+44 1947 000000",
  "checkinTime": "15:00",
  "checkoutTime": "11:00",
  "numberOfRooms": 18,
  "petsAllowed": true,
  "amenityFeature": [
    { "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification", "name": "Free Wi-Fi", "value": true },
    { "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification", "name": "Parking", "value": false }
  ]
}

For an event or a dated tour departure, the markup carries the date, place, status and ticket offer, and it has to change when the event does.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Event",
  "name": "Whitby Harbour Night Walk",
  "startDate": "2026-11-14T19:00:00+00:00",
  "endDate": "2026-11-14T21:00:00+00:00",
  "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
  "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
  "location": {
    "@type": "Place",
    "name": "Whitby Swing Bridge",
    "address": {
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "addressLocality": "Whitby",
      "postalCode": "YO21 3AA",
      "addressCountry": "GB"
    }
  },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "url": "https://www.example.com/tours/harbour-night-walk/2026-11-14",
    "price": "18.00",
    "priceCurrency": "GBP",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "validFrom": "2026-08-01T09:00:00+01:00"
  }
}

One price, everywhere

The rule that matters most is consistency. The price in your feed, the price on the landing page, any price in markup and the price at the last step of checkout must be the same total for the same dates and party. Hotel Center checks the landing page price against the feed and expects taxes and fees to cover every mandatory charge.¹⁴ UK law sets a similar expectation for every price you advertise, covered in chapter 10. When the systems disagree, fix the source of truth first, usually the booking engine, and let the feed, page and markup all read from it.

If you are adding or cleaning up markup, the site's Understand skill for AI coding agents adds JSON-LD that matches the visible page and refuses to mark up a price that is not on it. Shops face similar price consistency problems, and the ecommerce SEO guide covers Offer markup where it does feed a Google feature.

Travel inventory comes and goes. Hotels close, routes are dropped, tours run only in summer, events end. How a site handles pages for things that are temporarily or permanently unavailable affects crawling, indexing and the experience of every traveller who lands on one from an old link.

Crawl budget becomes a real constraint for sites with more than a million unique pages whose content changes weekly, sites with more than 10,000 pages changing daily, and sites with many URLs reported as Discovered, currently not indexed. Large OTAs and car hire sites usually fit one of those. The fixes are to consolidate duplicate content, return 404 or 410 for pages removed permanently, eliminate soft 404s, keep sitemaps current with lastmod dates for changed content, and avoid long redirect chains.²² Smaller travel sites rarely have a crawl budget problem, but the same rules keep their index clean.

For pages that you know will expire, the robots meta tag's unavailable_after rule tells Google not to show the page after a given date and time, in RFC 822, RFC 850 or ISO 8601 format. Googlebot crawls the URL much less often after that date.²³

<meta name="robots" content="unavailable_after: 2026-11-15T00:00:00+00:00">

Bing and other engines that support IndexNow take notifications of added, updated and deleted URLs, in batches of up to 10,000 URLs per request, verified with a key file hosted on the site.²⁴ For a travel site where prices and availability change daily, this is a cheap way to tell participating engines what changed. Bing's webmaster team has also asked sites to keep lastmod values in sitemaps accurate, set to when the page content changed and not to when the sitemap was generated, and to use IndexNow alongside sitemaps for content used in AI-powered search.²⁵

POST /IndexNow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "a3f9c2e17b8d4f60",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/a3f9c2e17b8d4f60.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/hotels/whitby/harbour-view-hotel",
    "https://www.example.com/tours/harbour-night-walk"
  ]
}

Travel is international by nature. A holiday let in Cornwall is booked from Germany, a tour in Lisbon from the UK, a car hire desk in Malaga from both. Many travel sites therefore run several language and country versions, show prices in several currencies, and have to decide which of those differences deserves its own URL. The international SEO guide covers the structure decisions in depth; this chapter covers what is specific to travel.

Language, market and currency are three different things

A UK traveller and an Irish traveller may both want English content but pay in pounds and euros. A German traveller wants German content whatever currency they pay in. Give each language its own URL, and give a country its own URL only when the content genuinely differs for that market: different inventory, prices that include different taxes, different legal terms or payment options. A currency switcher on its own usually does not need separate indexable URLs. If prices are rendered by currency on one URL, make sure the default version that crawlers see is complete and sensible.

Avoid redirecting people automatically by IP address or browser language. Google advises against automatically redirecting users from one language version to another and against adapting content by IP location, which it calls difficult and generally unreliable. Most Google crawls come from the US, and Google does not vary the crawler's location to find variations of a page.²⁶ A site that forces US visitors onto a dollar version may be showing Googlebot only that version. Offer a visible switcher and remember the traveller's choice.

Currency also touches price accuracy and consumer law. Hotel Center validates prices in the currency shown on Google against your site's price in that same currency, so conversion rates have to be kept current.¹⁴ UK guidance on price transparency expects the breakdown of a total to include details of any exchange rate used to calculate it in pounds, and allows local charges in another currency to be shown as converted amounts.²⁷ When you set up a new market, choosing a URL structure for a new market, how to audit hreflang and localising content go through the details.

Travel demand is seasonal, and it is seasonal in two ways at once. People search for a trip weeks or months before they take it, and both the search and the stay peak at different times for different products. A ski chalet, a summer beach let and a Christmas market tour each have their own year. SEO work that ignores this publishes too late and judges results against the wrong month.

Read the year from your own data first

Your Search Console and booking data are the best record of your own seasonality. Export clicks and impressions by week for at least the last two years, and bookings by booking date and by stay date. The gap between the two peaks is your booking window, and it tells you when content and fixes need to be live. Google Trends is useful for markets you do not yet serve, but read it correctly: each data point is divided by total searches in that place and period and then scaled from 0 to 100, from a sample of searches.²⁸ A Trends line is relative interest, not search volume, and two regions with the same line can have very different totals.

Forecast in ranges, compare year on year

• Compare each week or month with the same period last year, adjusted for when Easter and school holidays fell. Month-on-month change in a seasonal business mostly shows the calendar.
• Forecast organic bookings as a range built from last year's seasonal curve and the recent year-on-year trend, and say what would move it (a new market, a migration, a change in Google's modules).
• Separate demand from share. If impressions for your core searches are down by the same amount as the market in Trends, your visibility held and demand fell. If impressions fell further, you lost ground.
• Plan publishing against the booking window, not the stay date. A guide to autumn half-term breaks published in October is too late for most of the people booking them.
• Keep big site changes out of the peak booking window. Migrating a website without losing traffic applies twice over when the business takes most of its money in a few months.

The measuring SEO guide goes further into forecasting and year-on-year reporting, and recovering from a traffic drop shows how to tell a seasonal dip from a real loss.

Informational travel content is under more pressure than any other kind of travel page. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that when a Google search showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits.²⁹ A generic answer to when to visit Lisbon, or what to do in Edinburgh for a weekend, is exactly what a summary can give on the page.

What still earns clicks, links and citations is content an AI summary has to borrow from, because nobody else has it. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether content shows first-hand expertise, giving the example of expertise that comes from having visited a place.³⁰ For a travel business, that is a natural advantage. A hotel knows which rooms are quiet, a walking tour operator knows which streets flood, a car hire company knows how long the shuttle from the terminal really takes.

Kinds of travel content that earn their place

• Practical specifics only an operator knows: walking times from the station with the route, where to park, what the terrain is like for a wheelchair or a pushchair, which tours run in the rain.
• Your own data, published with a method: for example a yearly look at when your guests book and how far ahead, or how prices on your routes changed through the season. Journalists and other sites cite data they cannot get elsewhere.
• Photos and video you took, of the actual rooms, routes and views, with dates.
• Honest comparisons: which area of a city suits which kind of traveller, including when you are not the right choice.
• Event and season information kept up to date: opening dates, festival dates, closures, engineering works.

The walking time and route details in that example are illustrative; write your own from your own measurements. The point is the shape: short passages that state a fact, give its context and are honest about limits.

Let the AI crawlers in, deliberately

AI assistants can only cite pages their search crawlers can read. OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot gathers content for ChatGPT search, and sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers; GPTBot is the separate crawler for model training, and blocking it does not remove a site from search.³¹ Anthropic separates ClaudeBot for training from Claude-SearchBot for search, and blocking the search crawler may reduce a site's visibility in Claude's search results.³² PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity's results and is not used for training, while Perplexity-User fetches pages when a user asks and generally ignores robots.txt.³³ A travel site that wants to appear in AI answers but keep its content out of training could use rules like these:

# Search and answer crawlers: allowed
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

# Model training crawlers: blocked
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

# Everyone: keep booking flows and filtered search results out
User-agent: *
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search?

Whether to block training crawlers is a business decision with no clear search benefit either way. Be aware of what you get in return for allowing crawling: Cloudflare's data for January to July 2025 showed OpenAI's crawlers making 1,091 page requests for every referral they sent by July, and Anthropic's about 38,065, against 5.4 for Google.³⁴ Check too that a CDN or bot protection rule is not blocking the crawlers you meant to allow, which is common on travel sites that fight scraping. Robots.txt for AI crawlers covers the options and the content SEO guide covers writing pages that get cited.

Travel businesses in the UK publish two things that are now closely regulated: prices and reviews. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 strengthened the rules on both, and gave the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) power to decide cases and fine businesses itself. This chapter is a summary for search and content teams, written for the UK. Other countries have different rules, and none of this is legal advice.

Total prices and drip pricing

The CMA's guidance on price transparency, published in November 2025, sets out what a price in an invitation to purchase has to include. Mandatory charges must be in the headline total. They include taxes, booking and administration fees however they are described, unavoidable fees for services such as routine cleaning, local taxes, resort fees and other unavoidable charges payable on arrival or departure at hotels, ports or airports, and pick-up or pay-on-arrival fees or mandatory insurance for car hire.²⁷ Refundable deposits and card pre-authorisations at check-in are not mandatory charges.²⁷

The guidance uses travel examples that are worth reading in full. One describes an accommodation platform where a family searches for a seven-night cottage stay. Because the platform knows the number of adults and nights, the local tax can be calculated and should be added to the base price in the search results, so the listing shows the total. Another says a 'from' price for a hotel can be based on the cheapest basic room, but advertising a weekend break with a midweek 'from' price, or a summer break with winter pricing, would be misleading.²⁷ Where part of the price has to be paid at the hotel, that is material information the traveller must be given.²⁷

This is not theoretical. In November 2025 the CMA opened its first investigations under the new powers, into eight businesses, and said drip pricing is banned under the new regime. It sent advisory letters to 100 more businesses about additional fees and sales tactics, in sectors that include holidays (including package travel), rail travel, bus and coach travel, airport parking and luggage storage. It can fine up to 10% of global turnover.³⁵ For SEO teams, the point is that the price on a landing page, in a feed, in markup or in a title tag is an advertised price. A title tag that says 'Hotels in York from £45' has to be true on the terms the guidance sets.

Reviews

Fake reviews, reviews that hide that they were incentivised, and false or misleading review information such as an average rating that includes fake reviews are banned practices. A business that publishes reviews or review ratings must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove that content, including a published policy, regular risk assessments, and processes to detect, investigate and respond.³⁶ For a travel site, this covers reviews you collect and display on property and tour pages, the aggregate ratings you show in listings, and any ratings you put in markup. Collect reviews from every guest, not only the happy ones, and say how you collect them.

Packages and ATOL, where they apply

Two more rules matter to some travel sites. Under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, combining two or more types of travel service for the same trip (carriage of passengers, accommodation, car or motorcycle hire, and other tourist services) can create a package, with the organiser liable for the whole trip. Government guidance says that a combination advertised or sold as a 'package', or under a similar term such as 'combined deal' or 'all-inclusive', is a package, and so are some linked online bookings made within 24 hours where the traveller's details pass from one trader to the next.³⁷ Words in page titles and landing page copy can therefore have legal consequences. Separately, businesses selling flight-inclusive packages or flight-only arrangements to UK consumers generally need an ATOL unless they are an airline or fall into an exempt category, and this applies wherever the business is based if it advertises to UK consumers.³⁸ If your site sells any combination of travel services, have a specialist check how it is structured and described before you build landing pages around it.

AI assistants have moved from suggesting itineraries to connecting with booking systems. How far each one goes changes month by month and varies by country, so the details below are dated and should be checked again before you plan around them.

What the platforms have documented

• Google AI Mode: in November 2025 Google added trip planning with Canvas (on desktop in the US, for people in the AI Mode Labs experiment), expanded its Flight Deals tool to more than 200 countries and territories including the UK, and said it was working with Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, IHG, Choice Hotels and Wyndham on booking flights and hotels in AI Mode.³⁹
• In August 2026 hotel booking in AI Mode began rolling out in the US in English. Travellers pick "Continue on Google" next to an integrated partner and pay with Google Pay, while the hotel or booking platform remains the merchant of record. The launch partners were Booking.com, Choice Hotels, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG, Marriott, Priceline, Trip.com and Wyndham. Flight price tracking in AI Mode became available in more than 180 countries and territories, with flights still bought on the airline's or booking platform's site.⁴⁰
• Gemini: according to an August 2026 post on Google's blog, Gemini plans trips using real-time data from Google Maps, Flights and Hotels, recommendations from YouTube creators, and, if the user calls on it, the Viator app to explore and book tours and activities.⁴¹
• ChatGPT: in October 2025 OpenAI launched apps in ChatGPT, with Booking.com and Expedia among the pilot partners. At launch, apps were not available in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the UK.⁴² OpenAI's help centre says app availability depends on the app, the plan, the region and other factors.⁴³
• Perplexity: in March 2025 Skift reported that Perplexity had launched hotel booking inside its search product through a partnership with Selfbook, and found glitches in its own tests.⁴⁴

The common pattern is that assistants plan with data from partners and large platforms, and hand the booking to an existing merchant. The OTAs see the risk clearly. Booking Holdings' 2025 annual report warns that search platforms increasingly add AI answers that may satisfy intent without sending users to its services or may favour the platform's own offerings, and that AI agents may evolve into full booking platforms.¹

How travellers say they use it

Use by travellers is growing but uneven. A survey run by YouGov for Expedia Group of more than 5,700 adults in the US, UK and India in March 2026 found 53% comfortable letting AI suggest travel options. Only 8% of travellers in the US and UK said they rely on AI chatbots and agents when planning a trip, against 59% who use search engines and 49% who use online travel agencies. 66% said they would not trust an AI assistant to book on their behalf.⁴⁵ Expedia Group sells through its own brands and has an interest in the conclusion that travellers prefer trusted brands, so read the figures as one company's survey. In the UK more generally, Ofcom reported that ChatGPT received 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024.¹¹

What to do about it

How assistants choose which businesses to name and the tutorial on getting recommended by AI assistants go through this work step by step, and how to measure visibility in AI search covers tracking it.

Travel SEO is measured in bookings, and the path to a booking is long and full of comparison. A traveller may search a destination, read your area guide, leave for an OTA, come back by brand search a week later and book. Measurement has to account for that without claiming every booking for organic search.

Track the booking funnel properly

GA4's recommended events map closely onto a booking flow: search, view_item_list, view_item, select_item, begin_checkout, add_payment_info and purchase. The purchase event needs a transaction ID, a value and a currency in three-letter ISO 4217 format.⁴⁶ On many travel sites the booking engine sits on a different domain or a third-party system, and the purchase event is lost or attributed to the booking engine. Check cross-domain tracking and that the transaction ID and value come through for every booking, and reconcile analytics bookings with the booking system each month.

Look-to-book and booking windows

Look-to-book is the ratio of searches or views to bookings. It is a standard travel industry measure, and it is useful for SEO because it shows whether organic visitors are the right ones. A destination page that brings a lot of visitors who never search for dates is attracting researchers, which may be fine for a guide and a problem for a page meant to sell. Measure it by landing page group and by season, because travellers browse far ahead of the booking window and convert closer to it.

What Search Console does not show

Much of a travel business's Google visibility happens in modules that ordinary search reporting does not cover cleanly: free booking links, Things to do listings, the Business Profile. Find out what your connectivity partner and Hotel Center report, tag links you control with UTM parameters where the platform allows it, and keep these channels separate from organic web clicks in reports so a change in one does not hide a change in the other. AI assistants add another gap, because many visits from them arrive with incomplete referrer data. The measuring SEO guide covers channel groups, branded and non-branded splits and AI traffic in GA4 in detail, and the Measurement setup skill checks that the tracking is in place.

Travel SEO can absorb any amount of effort. These are the first things I would do for each type, in order, before anything else in this guide.

Independent hotel or small group

Holiday let manager

OTA, metasearch or car hire broker

Tour, activity or attraction operator

Destination guide or tourism board