By Pablo Revale
Your Hero Isn’t Coming. It Never Was.
Vol. IV. AI was supposed to be the great equalizer. It is becoming the great consolidator.
March 16, 2026 · 3 Minutes
Adapted from Originally published in Unstoppable Hospitality on LinkedIn.
01
READ THE QUESTION AGAIN
Booking.com CFO Ewout Steenbergen went on the record saying AI is "not really a risk at all." Another incumbent in denial or the only one paying attention? Read again. The question the CFO answered wasn’t "Is AI a threat to travel?" It was "Is AI a threat to us?" And the honest answer is no. Not when you’re the one building the weapons.
02
THE NARRATIVE THE INDUSTRY LOVES TO TELL
The story goes like this: AI will disrupt the middlemen. LLMs will send guests directly to hotels. The OTA stranglehold will finally break. Distribution will be democratized. What’s actually happening is different. Booking.com is investing $700 million into AI this year alone. They have 200+ ML engineers building agentic tools for end-to-end trip planning. Days after OpenAI launched its app marketplace, Booking and Expedia were already embedded inside ChatGPT. Meanwhile, most hotels are still debating whether to update their website’s meta descriptions.
03
THE MATH DOES NOT LIE
Booking Holdings made $23.7 billion in revenue last year. Expedia, $13.6 billion. Between them, they spent over $5.2 billion on marketing. That’s more than the entire annual revenue of most hotel chains. And now they’re redirecting that firepower toward owning the AI layer too. So when people say "AI will change distribution," they’re right. But they assume the change benefits hotels. Why would it? If the only players investing billions in AI infrastructure are OTAs, then AI doesn’t break their power. It concentrates it. The new gatekeepers won’t replace the old ones. They’ll be the old ones, wearing a new interface.
04
THE GAP IS WIDENING
Think about what’s already happening. Hotels that block AI crawlers are invisible to LLMs. Hotels that don’t have structured data lose to OTA listings that do. Hotels that wait for "the right moment" to invest are handing every AI-driven booking to Booking.com by default. OTAs aren’t sleeping through this revolution. They’re funding it. Right now, the gap isn’t closing. It’s widening. And every month a hotel waits, the cost of catching up doubles. AI was supposed to be the great equalizer. It’s becoming the great consolidator.
