Travel Brands Lose Ground in AI Engines Despite Marketing Budgets
More than a third of U.S. travelers now start product research inside ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity instead of Google. The brands these AI engines cite are reshaping travel decisions before consumers ever see a traditional search result.
5W, a public relations firm, released the first study ranking roughly 50 major airlines and hotel brands by how often they appear in AI-generated answers. The research measured citation frequency across four platforms - ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews - using 60+ travel-related prompts.
The findings overturn conventional wisdom about travel marketing. Loyalty program size does not predict AI visibility. Neither does paid media spending. Instead, brands with sustained press coverage in publications that AI engines trust consistently rank higher.
The concentration problem
In several categories, the top three brands capture more than 70 percent of total citations. More than twenty competitors split the remainder.
Luxury hotel brands face particular exposure. Premium properties command pricing power in the market but cite weaker than expected in general travel prompts. The gap stems from limited editorial coverage - the third-party sources AI engines retrieve from.
Earned media beats paid spend
Brands with disciplined public relations programs and structured authority on trusted publications outrank competitors with larger budgets. Some of the category's biggest spenders cite weaker than mid-tier competitors.
"Loyalty is not protecting the leaders," said Ronn Torossian, founder of 5W. "Earned media volume is. So is structured authority on the third-party sources the engines trust."
For most travel brands, the gap between marketing spend and AI citation share represents the largest unmeasured loss in the budget. Brands that build earned-media infrastructure now will compound their lead. Those that wait will inherit answers they did not build.
What this means for PR teams
The travel category is being reshuffled inside the chatbox in real time. Twenty years of Google optimization no longer guarantees visibility where travelers now make decisions.
PR professionals managing travel brands should prioritize tier-1 press placement and third-party authority over paid media and online travel agency distribution. The AI Learning Path for Public Relations Specialists covers strategies for building brand visibility across AI platforms.
The full index, including ranked tables and the publications most cited by AI engines, is available at 5W's website.
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