Who we serve
We look at a hotel the way a guest and an AI assistant do, and report what we find with the evidence attached. Three kinds of operator ask for that, for three different reasons.
AI overlooks independents. That is a discovery problem, not a quality problem.
We measured 659 registered properties in Barcelona across 27,360 AI travel answers. Independents were 8 times more likely than chain hotels never to surface at all: 32.4% against 4.0%. Once they did surface, they were recommended just as warmly.
You are not losing on merit. You are losing before the comparison starts.
An assistant asked for a hotel like yours builds its shortlist from what it can find and quote. If your property is not in that shortlist, nothing about your rooms, your service or your reviews ever gets considered. You are not being rejected. You are absent.
The upside is that absence is fixable, and most of the fixes are small. Read the full method and findings in the Stiplo Barcelona Study.
What we find on independent sites
The same four patterns, property after property. None of them look like emergencies, which is exactly why they survive so long.
Your best facts are somewhere AI cannot read them
The spa treatments sit in a downloadable PDF. The room sizes live inside a photo. The rate logic is explained on a page that only renders after a script runs. A guest can eventually find all of it. An assistant answering in four seconds cannot, so it recommends the hotel that made it easy.
You are outbid on your own name
Someone searching for you by name is your cheapest possible booking, and it is the one most often intercepted. When an OTA owns the top of your branded result and your own page loads slowly beneath it, you pay commission on demand you already created.
The website belongs to whoever has time
In most independents nobody owns the site full time. Things break quietly: a dead booking link on one room type, an offer that expired last season, a contact page with the old phone number. None of it is anyone's fault and all of it costs bookings.
Your agency reports clicks, not conversion
Paid search dashboards show traffic delivered. What they do not show is what happened when that traffic arrived: whether the page earned trust, whether the booking path worked on a phone, whether the offer it promised still existed.
How we start with a single property
The free Mystery Shop covers one property. We read your live site the way a guest does, ask the assistants for a hotel like yours, record what they say, and send you an evidenced report. No card and no account required.
You get the findings with the evidence behind each one, ordered by what to fix first. The changes are made by you or your developer. If you want the site watched over time so problems do not creep back, that is a paid plan and a short conversation.
One view of your whole portfolio's direct-booking health
Every property scored on its own, the issues that repeat across the estate surfaced once, and a monthly read your owners can take to a board: where you are losing bookings, and where you could win more.
The portfolio in one report
Your portfolio
Illustrative5 properties, scored per property
| Property | Score | Top issue |
|---|---|---|
The HarboursideAmsterdam Top issue: Absent from the AI answer for its category | 58Needs work | Absent from the AI answer for its category |
Mont ClairEdinburgh Top issue: Expired offer still live on the homepage | 71Fair | Expired offer still live on the homepage |
Casa LumarLisbon Top issue: No localised content for its main market | 49Needs work | No localised content for its main market |
The WrenBristol Top issue: Listing and site disagree on check-in time | 76Fair | Listing and site disagree on check-in time |
Atelier NorteBilbao Top issue: Room rate on site does not match the booking engine | 64Needs work | Room rate on site does not match the booking engine |
Repeats across the estate
- Weak AI visibility on rebranded properties3 properties
- Missing localised content for the local market2 properties
- Listing details that disagree with the site2 properties
Illustrative example. Your report is built from your own properties and your own pages.
What we hear from groups
The same gaps come up across portfolio after portfolio. They are rarely on the radar until a guest hits one and books elsewhere.
Newer or rebranded properties go quiet
A property that changed name or flag falls out of the AI answer and the search results while the brand catches up. The booking goes to the hotel next door that did not move.
Localised content is missing
A guest searching in the local language, for the local market, finds an English-only page or nothing at all. The demand is there; the answer is not in their words.
Agency SEO that is not comprehensive
When search sits inside a PPC agency, the technical and content gaps that quietly cost direct bookings go unchecked. You pay for clicks and lose the conversion you already had.
No board-ready read of the estate
Ownership wants one monthly view of where the portfolio stands, scored per property, with the recurring issues named once. Pulling that together by hand stopped being feasible long ago.
How we start with a group
The free Mystery Shop covers one property, so you can see exactly what the report looks like before anything else. Run it on the property you worry about most.
From there we scope the portfolio with you in a conversation: which properties, which markets, how often you want the read. There is no self-serve portfolio setup to wrestle with. You tell us about the estate, and we take it from there.
An independent read on how your assets actually present
Measured from outside the operator's reporting: what a guest meets on the site, what the AI assistants say when asked for a hotel like yours, and where the direct channel is quietly leaking. Scored per property, with the evidence attached, and comparable across the portfolio.
The gap on the owner side
Not a management problem, a visibility one. Nobody in the chain is paid to look at the asset the way a guest does.
The operator marks their own homework
Channel mix, direct share and campaign performance all reach you through the party being measured. The numbers are usually accurate. What they cannot tell you is what a guest actually met on the way to the booking, because nobody in that chain is looking from the outside.
Leakage arrives as commission, never as a defect
A broken booking path or a hotel that AI cannot find does not appear anywhere as a fault. It appears months later as a higher share of OTA business and a softer direct line, by which point the cause is untraceable.
Brand standards are asserted, not evidenced
The management agreement says the property will be presented to standard. Verifying that across a managed estate means someone opening every site, on a phone, in the guest's language, and recording what they find. It rarely happens, and never at a cadence that would catch drift.
No digital baseline at acquisition or refinancing
You underwrite the physical asset in detail and inherit the commercial one on trust. There is usually no record of where the property stood digitally on the day you took it on, so there is nothing to improve against and nothing to hold anyone to.
How we start with an owner
Run the free Mystery Shop on one asset, ideally the one you are least sure about. It covers a single property and costs nothing, so you can judge whether the report tells you something your current reporting does not.
From there we scope the estate with you: which assets, which markets, how often you want the read. Reports can go to you, to the operator, or to both. Most owners find the second option lands better, because the findings arrive with evidence rather than as an accusation.
To be clear about scope: we measure how the property presents and how it is found. We do not audit the operator's books, and we do not implement the fixes. What we give you is an evidenced, repeatable baseline.
Start with one property
One property, one report, no cost. We review each request and respond within one business day.