Your Hotel Isn't on the Map Anymore

I use AI every single day. I prompt it for recommendations, research, comparisons — the full range. And somehow, until recently, I completely missed something that should have been obvious to me: AI doesn't find hotels the way Google does. It doesn't crawl. It doesn't rank. It retrieves —, and if your property hasn't been built into what it retrieves, you simply don't exist.

That realisation hit harder because of who I am. I consult on AI in hospitality. I live in this space. And I still overlooked it. Which tells me something important about where most hotel operators in Kigali, Nairobi, Lagos — across the continent — are right now.

The last decade trained hospitality businesses to think about SEO. Keywords. Backlinks. Google rankings. That game made sense, and a lot of brands got good at it. But the traveller's first move is changing. More people are opening ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and typing "best boutique hotel in Kigali for a business trip" — and getting a direct answer. No search results page. No scrolling. Just a recommendation.

If your hotel isn't part of what those models surface, you aren't in the conversation. Not ranked lower. Not on page two. Just absent.

The brands that will figure this out first — the ones that optimise their content, their descriptions, their digital presence for how AI reads and retrieves information — will have a window that won't stay open long. In markets like East Africa, where the competition hasn't caught on yet, that window is wider than anywhere else in the world right now.

I missed this. Most people building and running hotels here have too.

The question worth sitting with is: what does it actually take to show up?