How bed bug safety makes your hotel discoverable in the age of AI
Six things our IHTF London AI panel taught us about how travellers find hotels now
Six learnings from our AI panel at the International Hotel Technology Forum (IHTF) London – and what each one means for your hotel.
AI is changing how travellers find and choose hotels, fast. Use of AI for trip planning more than doubled in nine months, from 11% to 24% (Global Rescue, Oct 2024–July 2025) – a faster adoption curve than mobile booking or online reviews at the same stage. One in three travellers now uses AI to book trips (Adyen, 2025). And travellers trust AI assistants more than travel bloggers or influencers (Booking.com, n=37,325).
The front door has moved. Most of the decision now happens above your booking engine – in an AI answer you don’t control. Here is how that shift works, and how Valpas helps your hotel win in each area.
1. The front door moved
Six in ten Google searches end without a click. The AI answer at the top is the new front door – not your website. AI booking agents summarise reviews and verifiable attributes before a traveller ever reaches your page.
How Valpas helps: your bed bug-safe status becomes a machine-readable attribute AI can read and surface. Your hotel appears in the answer, not after it.
2. Filters are giving way to conversations
In a chat, travellers type what they actually need – in private. Quiet concerns that never fit a filter are becoming booking attributes. Pests such as bed bugs now rank as the single top concern when travellers book (Phocuswright, 2026).
How Valpas helps: bed bug safety was the ultimate quiet concern. Valpas turns it into an attribute you can own, name and surface where travellers ask for it.
3. Verification is the new currency
To a model, an unverified claim and a hallucination look identical. A marketing line about “safety” carries no weight. Independent, real-time proof does.
How Valpas helps: Valpas is a third-party reference, audited by Bureau Veritas, with real-time room-level verification. That authority is what AI systems cite and trust. The demand is already there: around 30% of US travellers – and 15% in the UK and France – use AI or search to check a hotel’s bed bug reputation before booking (Phocuswright, 2026).
4. Reputation gets gated, not averaged
A person reads one poor review against 400 good ones and books anyway. An AI asked “does this hotel have bed bug reports?” treats a credible flag as a gate, not a data point. In the age of AI, a single bed bug review aggregates across platforms and impacts demand. Half of travellers say they would not book a hotel with a recent bed bug review (Phocuswright, 2026).
How Valpas helps: Valpas safeguards your reputation with continuous, verifiable proof of safety – a credible counter-signal that both AI and guests can rely on.
5. AI remembers – and the advantage compounds
Ask once for a quiet, bed bug-safe hotel, and every future trip is filtered that way. The hotels that match keep getting recommended.
How Valpas helps: once your hotel is the verified, bed bug-safe option, you stay in the recommendation set. The flywheel compounds in your favour.
6. Attributes have ROI
The same booking page, with and without one attribute surfaced, returned a 30%+ lift in direct conversion in A/B testing. The willingness is real: between 79% and 84% of travellers would choose a certified four-star over an uncertified five-star at the same price (Phocuswright, 2026).
How Valpas helps: Valpas turns bed bug safety into an attribute you can surface where bookings are made – converting demand you couldn’t see into direct revenue.
What this means for your hotel
The hotels that win this won’t be the loudest. They’ll be the most verifiable.
That is what Valpas is built for: the third-party verified, real-time attribute travellers ask for – and AI systems trust. Including our integration with ChatGPT.
Audit your hotel’s AI visibility for free
With thanks to Morgane Bimet, Lena Arbery and Catt McLeod for the conversation at IHTF London.