The Skift Takeaway

THE ARGUMENT

In AI search, a hotel either appears or it doesn’t. Slavin cited research showing only 6% of hotels surface in AI results, making visibility a commercial problem, not just a marketing one. He also said the AI-search consumer is not a monolith. Budget travelers price-compare, while luxury travelers are “purely experiential.” Aside from providing a multifaceted discovery experience, the biggest challenge in AI search is attribution. Traveler decisions begin to form weeks in advance, prior to active research, and then on the other end, the last click captures the credit. That gap is the problem Curacity exists to solve: Its core model uses deterministic matching to link upper-funnel content to a booking.

THE EVIDENCE

• Only 6% of hotels appear in AI search; 94% don’t surface at all. — Slavin, citing RevPAR Genius
• “With AI search, it is completely binary; you either appear or you don’t appear in a consideration setting, so the stakes are a lot higher,” Slavin said.
• “It’s really hard to prove definitive attribution. Currently, the LLMs themselves can’t do that,” Slavin said.
• Curacity’s platform matches consumer PII (personally identifiable information) to tie upper-funnel content to a downstream hotel conversion through LLMs.
• An independent London luxury hotel’s Condé Nast Traveler placement drove 271 citations in six months, lifting its AI visibility score from 15% to 27% and topping established competitors Rosewood, The Ritz London, and The Connaught. (see image for details)