Hotel’s own prices are special. Your travel experience depends on them.
Why LLM platforms need direct hotel inventory — and how DirectBooker delivers it.
LLMs can become the first and only stop a traveler needs all the way from inspiration through booking. Hotels are the most valuable category in that journey, and price is one of the top factors in hotel selection. But not just any price. The way users shop for hotels has a structural quirk that determines whether your product feels complete or requires users to search elsewhere to finish the job. The hotel's own direct price is the reference travelers use to interpret every other price they see. Without the direct price, the representation of the hotel is fundamentally incomplete, and we’ve seen that users will leave to find it. With the hotel’s price, the entire experience works.
The rationale that drives this behavior
Users approach hotel pricing the way they approach any consumer purchase with an MSRP. The hotel price is what they treat as "the real price" and the anchor against which other prices are interpreted. It isn't just a preference; it's how the comparison becomes meaningful. A user looking at three online travel agency (OTA) prices for the same room ($271, $264, $258) has no way to know whether those are discounts or markups. With the hotel's own $259 visible, the pricing making up the slate quickly becomes clear.
The reason intermediaries – like OTAs – cannot play this role is that the hotel’s pricing authority comes from delivering the service. The hotel owns the building, employs the staff, sets the policies, and is the entity the user will deal with when anything matters: a late arrival, a billing dispute, a room that isn't ready.
Our own experience at Google and Tripadvisor has shown that without the direct price as an anchor, users leave the product causing total clicks to fall, along with revenue. To prevent this, most sophisticated meta players purposefully showcase the hotel’s price alongside OTA prices. A Skift research study demonstrates this point on Google’s Hotel Search product, showing that the hotel’s price was displayed at the top of the list of prices 80% the time – even when it wasn’t the lowest price.
Google has now publicly described this dynamic in the AI era. At Skift Megatrends in London in January 2026, Google's Travel Industry Head Jay Chauhan walked through how users actually use LLMs for travel: they begin research on an LLM, then revert to Google to type the specific hotel name to find the direct price. He noted Google is seeing the empirical signature in their query data: a decline in searches on generic terms like "all-inclusive holiday" and a double-digit increase in searches on specific hotel names. The LLM does the inspiration work but without accurate hotel pricing; the user goes elsewhere to verify the price and book.
Direct prices are more than a reference
Beyond this, more than half of travelers prefer booking directly (Sources: Skift, Hotrec, Phocuswright). There’s a stable set of reasons for this across studies: better service recovery, easier changes, loyalty recognition, member rates, and the confidence that comes with dealing directly with the entity responsible for the stay.
The direct booking advantage becomes most visible with direct booking discounts and loyalty memberships. Member and direct rates are routinely 5–15% below the lowest public OTA price, and they bundle perks — free breakfast, room upgrades, late checkout — that OTAs can't offer at all. For the ~200+ million travelers enrolled in major hotel loyalty programs, the direct price is also the best price.
Why most platforms stop at the OTAs
Solving this problem is harder than it looks, which is why most major platforms haven't. OTAs are the path of least resistance: a small number of partners, mature APIs, well-defined commercial models. When OpenAI launched its Apps platform in October 2025, the first travel partners were Booking.com and Expedia. This is a rational choice for a fast launch, but one that creates exactly the problem we've described. The user gets recommendations without the anchor price, creating a trust gap that sends them elsewhere for verification.
Hotels don't maintain a common API for direct rates across brands and independents. Direct distribution runs through a fragmented stack of central reservation systems, property management systems, booking engines, and connectivity partners with multiple vendors at each layer, no single endpoint exposing authoritative direct pricing across the global market. It's tempting to focus on the large global chains, which carry outsized mind share through strong brands and sophisticated technology teams. But more than 40% of US hotels are independent; in Europe, independents make up over 60%.
How DirectBooker closes the gap
We started DirectBooker to solve the direct rates aggregation problem. While LLM platforms focus on scaling horizontally to capture broad market opportunity, DirectBooker offers deep, differentiated, vertical integration with hundreds of chains and hundreds of thousands of independents, integrating and normalizing their feeds, and serving authoritative ARI (Availability, Rates, Inventory) data at LLM query volumes.
Our team built this capability inside Google at the scale and look-to-book ratios LLMs will generate, and we're building it again as independent infrastructure for AI tools to use. We cover the long tail in addition to the global chains, so the LLM has an answer for whatever hotel the traveler actually wants.
We currently have inventory from more than 100K chain hotels and over 900K independents, with real-time pricing data including member rates and loyalty benefits, along with property-specific offers. Five of the top 10 global hotel chains have signed commitments to share member rates (with more coming soon), along with several smaller and independent hotel groups that offer discounted, direct-only rates.
Our vision is to be the "Plaid for travel": enabling all LLMs to offer direct pricing for all hotels, globally, with the precise links to complete those bookings directly on the property’s website or through agentic tools. Member, loyalty and direct rates can sit alongside rates sourced from popular OTAs to provide travelers with a comprehensive view of their options, creating the best LLM-based customer experience, and keeping them on platform. Users are happier, because they get the lowest available rate and the reference price they'd otherwise leave to find.
We'd like to talk about how to make that happen on your platform.