The New Economics of Visibility

When we started Curacity 11 years ago, many hotels saw media visibility as a bonus – not a core strategy. Hotels wanted to be in Afar and Fathom, two of Curacity’s first media partners, but getting access wasn’t systematic or measurable. At Starwood Capital Group, I saw how asset managers relied on online travel agencies. They put their confidence in OTAs as distribution channels only because last-click attribution prevented proper tracking of the ROI of upper-funnel efforts.

Curacity changed that. We made media visibility scalable and tied it directly to bookings and revenue. But it still wasn’t mission-critical. Even with measurement, media visibility lived in the “nice-to-have” bucket. Core budgets stayed focused on OTAs, paid search, and other bottom-of-funnel tactics.

On November 30, 2022, the launch of ChatGPT marked the first meaningful shift in travel planning since Expedia, Travelocity, and Priceline brought the process online in the mid-1990s. In the last 25 years, the process has become increasingly complex, with the average traveler spending a month browsing hundreds of websites before making a booking decision.

In a short time, AI reduced the need to search for keywords, click links, and compare dozens of sites. The sheer majority of travelers still turn to Google search, but increasingly, they ask one LLM – and get tailored responses to nuanced questions instead.

Google followed suit in 2023 with its Search Generative Experience. Officially launched as AI Overviews on May 14, 2024, the feature provides summarized answers at the top of search results. The rise of “zero-click” searches has resulted in publishers “losing 20%, 30%, and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year.”

Never had a new technology come onto the scene and make the cost of not adapting so clear.

“Brands still optimizing for yesterday’s gatekeepers risk disappearing from tomorrow’s consideration set,” wrote Colin Nagy for Skift.

Who are the new gatekeepers? Seemingly, they’re AI platforms, but I’d argue they’re the authoritative sources LLMs use to create and shape consideration sets. Early data shows that third-party sources (not brand.com) lead the way, including Afar, Travel + Leisure, and the entire network of leading media outlets Curacity has partnered with in the last decade. Media visibility, Nagy reported for Skift, “has become performance marketing for machines, not just people.”

In 2024, Curacity conducted research in partnership with Skift. The report found that 81% of travelers trust media outlets more than any other channel – and 68% are more likely to book a luxury hotel based on editorial content than on hotel ads or direct offers. Hotel executives agreed. More than the travelers surveyed, 87% of executives said travelers are more likely to book if a media outlet recommends them, and 86% said their brand’s media perception is directly correlated with a higher average daily rate. Yet they ranked media visibility last among the most effective channels for creating new demand.

Instead, they prioritized paid search – 47% said it was their most effective channel, and 46% said they have increased their paid search budgets in the last few years to reach new guests. The disconnect between hotel executives and their guests is significant: While 39% of executives think digital advertising influences booking decisions, only 18% of travelers say it actually does.

We built Curacity VISTA to help the industry close this gap – and to address the challenges and opportunities AI has introduced into the travel planning process.

The core of the Curacity VISTA platform remains our proven newsletter solution – our media partners send content about our hotel customers to their high-value opt-in subscribers, at scale, tied to downstream bookings and revenue. This year alone, we’re projected to drive over $1 billion of verified gross booking value.

What’s new on the Curacity VISTA platform is the addition of articles published online by our media partners that LLMs can cite and reference. As travelers increasingly use AI platforms for discovery, appearing in AI search has never been more important, and authoritative editorial content ranks among the top sources LLMs use to generate recommendations.

From traditional search to generative AI, the way travelers discover and decide has fundamentally changed. At the same time, most hotel strategies have not.

Visibility is no longer a top-of-funnel luxury, but the input that determines whether a hotel exists in the decision set at all. Hotels that invest only in bottom-of-funnel channels may still capture existing intent, but they risk disappearing altogether from the moments that create demand.

What was once considered a bonus is now foundational.