The next OTA isn’t a website. It’s a chat box.

For twenty years, a traveler planning a trip opened Booking.com or Expedia. Today, a fast-growing share of them open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask, in plain language, “where should I stay?”

The AI answers with a short list of specific hotels. That list is the new shelf. And right now, when an assistant recommends a property, it usually links the traveler to an OTA — so the hotel pays a 15–25% commission on a guest who was already, literally, asking for them.

Big chains are building teams for this. The OTAs are partnering with OpenAI and Google directly. Independent and boutique hotels — the ones with the most character and the least leverage — have had no way to even see whether AI recommends them, let alone influence it.

That’s the gap DirectGuest closes.

We do three things the rest of the category doesn’t do together. We measure your visibility across four assistants — honestly, with repeated sampling, not a single lucky check. We place you in the answer, through a live connector inside Claude and ChatGPT, with a direct booking link. And we prove it, by tracking the real clicks AI sends to your booking page. Diagnosis, cure, and receipt — for the price of a single room-night a month.

Other tools will tell you you’re invisible and sell you a website audit. We’d rather just get you into the answer, and show you the bookings.

DirectGuest is built by Ian Schwarz. Building in the open, hotel by hotel — reach out if you run an independent property and want in early.