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Tourism and technology

How artificial intelligence and technology are changing the daily work of travel agencies, hotels and tour operators, step by step.

Tourism and technology

Copilots for vacation rental managers: 2026 comparison

Between March and July 2026, four vacation rental software providers launched their own 'AI copilot': Key Data (Dex AI), RentalReady (Maia, already covered in the MCP connector article), Conduit (no-code agents) and Hostaway (AI CoHost). An entire category is born in four months. None of them sells more apartments for you — they all help you manage the ones you already have. The difference between them lies in what they automate and what portfolio size they're built for.

5 min read

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Tourism and technology

MCP reaches vacation rentals: your software talks to ChatGPT

In June 2026, two vacation rental software providers —Beyond and RentalReady— launched MCP servers two weeks apart: ChatGPT and Claude can now plug straight into your pricing, bookings, tasks and reviews. The wave hotels rode in 2025 reaches the vacation rental vertical a year later. With one nuance almost nobody is explaining: these connectors are there for you to question your own data, not for the assistant to discover you and sell for you. They are two different things, and they get confused constantly.

5 min read

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Tourism and technology

ChatGPT ads for hotels: what they cost and if they pay off

OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT on 9 February 2026, and travel was among the pilot verticals from the start. They appear labelled as sponsored and separated from the answer, which OpenAI commits not to alter, and they show on the Free and Go plans — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu carry no advertising. In May came the self-serve Ads Manager, with no minimum spend: a business in the available markets can advertise now, Spain included since 31 August 2026. The question stopped being whether you can and became whether you should, before the organic work is done.

6 min read

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Tourism and technology

Google's GEO doctrine: “good SEO is good GEO”

In June 2026, a Google vice-president summed up the company's official position in a single sentence: “good SEO is good GEO”. Its generative AI features lean on the same ranking systems as always, so there is no need for a new strategy or special files such as llms.txt. That is largely true for Google Search, and it is also the version that suits a company living off search advertising. The nuance Google is under no obligation to give you: its doctrine describes Google, not ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, which are half the shop window. And on llms.txt, none of them has confirmed that it uses the file.

7 min read

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Tourism and technology

GDPR and AI on your travel website: 5 real-case decisions

Integrating AI into a travel website without GDPR trouble comes down to five decisions: consent that actually blocks (measurement scripts don't load until accepted), storing the minimum possible data, warning in plain language that text is processed with AI, naming providers without exposing technical architecture, and never pasting customers' personal data into public tools. I tell it from my own case: the Prompting Genie, a free AI tool I have in production.

6 min read

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Tourism and technology

A travel website in 5 languages, no plugins: lessons learned

A well-built multilingual website needs four things no plugin gives you for free: its own URL per language, reciprocal hreflang tags with x-default, translated slugs decided before publishing, and human review of translations. I explain it from a real case — my own website in Spanish, English, French, Catalan and Italian, served as static HTML with near-zero maintenance cost.

4 min read

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Tourism and technology

What is MCP and why all of travel is building a server

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol connecting AI models to external systems — booking engines, PMSs, databases — and in 2026 it consolidated as travel's de facto standard: adopters range from Sabre to SiteMinder. It solves the underlying problem: a hotel's website exposes only 5-10% of its operational information, and assistants need live data to answer with certainty.

4 min read

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Tourism and technology

Chatbot or AI agent: the difference that decides your sales

The practical difference between a chatbot and an AI agent is that the chatbot tells you how to book while the agent books: it sets goals, plans and executes multi-step tasks with little supervision. Spain already has cases with figures — RIU's assistant handles 75% of more than 1,500 daily queries — and a three-level ladder lets you place any system in minutes.

4 min read

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Tourism and technology

There is no "your ChatGPT ranking": 28,600 answers

There is no stable 'position' in AI answers: across 28,600 AI answers, the top recommended hotel changed in 40% of same-day repetitions of the same query, and the five big platforms agree on the number one only 8.9% of the time (Kollective, full report, July 2026). The useful metric is not a point-in-time position but consistency of appearance per platform over time.

3 min read

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Tourism and technology

Can an AI agent read your website? A 7-point checklist

AI assistant crawlers don't execute JavaScript, agents give up when they hit captchas and long forms, and a hotel's website typically exposes only 5-10% of its real operational information. This 7-point checklist lets you verify in one afternoon whether your site is readable — and usable — by the AIs that already recommend and are starting to book travel.

4 min read

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