Boosting hotel direct sales: How AI and Google are driving the game - powered by Blastness

This 21-minute session at ITB Berlin 2026's E Travel Track, co-presented by Matteo Pagni (SEA Partnership Manager, Blastness) and Marco Barlaam (Account Executive, Google), argues that despite the AI hype cycle dominating industry conversation, the fundamentals of hotel direct booking success remain anchored in search advertising and structured data — not LLM-driven bookings, which currently represent 0% of actual transactions.

Matteo Pagni opened by contextualizing the digital travel landscape: travelers are fully digital, planning accommodation and booking entirely online. He acknowledged the industry buzz around AI-powered search engines like Gemini but challenged the narrative with hard data from 2024 Spark Tool and TMS research: AI-powered search engines account for less than 5% of global searches, the overwhelming majority still occurring on traditional Google search. He introduced the concept that AI is 'reducing digital mobility' by creating all-in-one collection points that reduce touchpoints — yet cautioned that buzz doesn't equal current reality.

Marco Barlaam provided Google's perspective on the AI-versus-search debate. He cited Google's own data showing over 5 trillion annual searches, with 94% of frequent LLM users also being frequent Google search users. A critical statistic: shoppers are 2.3x more likely to use Google search versus ChatGPT for purchase decisions. He explained search behavior is evolving — 70% of today's queries are longtail and conversational (over 3 words), and there has been an 800% increase in conversational queries of 8+ words, driven by users feeling 'understood by the machine.' He revisited Google's 2020 'messy middle' research framework (exploration and evaluation phases in purchasing) and updated it: while AI is compressing research timelines, 49% of travel journeys still take over a month before a final decision, and 95% of consumers use multiple resources to plan travel. His central message: even when demand is created elsewhere (Instagram, YouTube, LLMs), it is still captured on search — 81% of social media users use Google search to evaluate discoveries made on social media, and two-thirds of consumers who discover brands on social media are influenced by Google search to ultimately purchase a different brand.

Barlaam also highlighted Google's evolving input and output modalities: Google Lens now handles over 25 billion queries per month (more transactional in nature than text queries), Circle to Search is growing rapidly among younger users (over 10% of searches initiated this way among that demographic), and AI Overviews are served to 2 billion users with AI Mode seeing over 75 million daily active users. He stressed that Gemini — which powers both AI Overviews and AI Mode — does not make decisions independently but bases them on knowledge graphs, rich content, price/availability data, maps, and user preference signals from email and search history.

Pagni returned to present Blastness's operational model and results. The company, with 20 years in Italian hospitality digital marketing, operates an integrated data hub ingesting signals from hotel websites, SEO data, booking engines, channel managers, PMS, rate shoppers, and platform data, feeding AI and machine learning bid management systems. Across a panel of nearly 2,000 hotels with €1.5 billion in transactions, Blastness clients achieved one-third of all bookings through the direct channel — a result Pagni described as exceeding even their own original ambitions. Beyond volume, a critical ADR differential emerged: OTA bookings averaged €238 ADR versus €310 ADR on the direct channel — a 30% premium on the direct channel, creating a 'double leverage' of cost savings plus higher revenue per booking. A specific case study of a four-star seasonal hotel in Siracusa showed 350% growth, with advertising driving approximately 50% of bookings while also lifting organic (website) bookings — demonstrating a compounding rather than cannibalistic relationship between paid and organic channels.

Looking ahead, Blastness is evolving from SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) strategies to position clients on AI search engines like Gemini, building structured data layers in websites and booking engines, and developing MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations to connect booking engines and rate/availability inventory directly to AI search — positioning for the eventual shift to AI-driven booking when it arrives.