Four hotel groups answered the same question and did not all answer it the same way.

By July 2026 Accor, Wyndham and IHG had launched apps inside ChatGPT, and Marriott had launched its own Ask Bonvoy search.

Since January, four of the biggest hotel groups in the world have answered the same question, and they haven’t all answered it the same way. The question is where guests start their search when AI is doing the planning.

Accor moved first, launching the ALL Accor app inside ChatGPT in January, showing live rates and loyalty member pricing before handing the booking back to their own platform. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts followed in May with around 8,400 hotels. IHG Hotels & Resorts in June with over 7,000. None of them is trying to own the moment the guest decides. They’ve chosen to show up well on a surface someone else owns, and keep the transaction and the guest data when the booking arrives.

Marriott Hotels went the other way. Ask Bonvoy launched in beta last month, a conversational search across roughly 10,000 properties, running on Marriott’s own AI, grounded in Marriott’s own data, booking through Marriott’s own channels. They can do that because nearly 283 million Bonvoy members means the demand already exists. The surface just gives it somewhere to land.

And notice what Marriott is doing alongside it. They’re partnering with Google on AI Mode travel and with OpenAI on advertising. The chain with the deepest loyalty base in hotels, with a surface of its own, still won’t bet on it exclusively.

Now translate this to restaurants and pubs. The closest thing on this side of the industry is the big pub groups. Stonegate Group, the UK’s largest pub company, launched its MiXR loyalty app in late 2023 and passed a million downloads inside a year. That’s a real asset, and it’s one million against Bonvoy’s 283 million.

For nearly everyone else, guest loyalty at scale doesn’t sit with the operator at all. It sits with the platforms and the networks around them, which is why DoorDash built Ask DoorDash on top of SevenRooms, and why American Express agreed to buy TheFork to sit alongside Resy and Tock.

The hotel chains are choosing between building the front door and renting space behind someone else’s. On the restaurant side, that choice is being made by the platforms, and operators are the inventory it’s being made about.

One more thing. Coverage of the Accor launch suggested dining bookings could eventually sit inside that same ChatGPT interface. So the first conversational surface carrying restaurant reservations at hotel-chain scale may not come from a restaurant company at all.

So if you’re an operator, ask your reservation platform one question. When a guest starts their search inside an AI, whose front door is your restaurant behind?