Lighthouse rolls out new Connect AI engine

Enables hotels to be discovered and booked by AI agents

Commercial travel and hospitality platform, Lighthouse, is behind a new AI engine Connect AI which is aimed at enabling a deeper connection between hotels and AI-powered search and travel planning platforms.

According to the team at Lighthouse, ‘Connect AI addresses two critical industry challenges: AI agents cannot access structured rate, availability, and contextual hotel information; while hotels lack the ability to enable direct booking capabilities and provide real-time information through AI platforms’.

Consumer adoption of AI has grown faster than any disruptive technology in history, as Mary Meeker recently highlighted with ChatGPT reaching 100 million users in less than three months.

Yet, despite the rapid adoption of AI for travel planning, hotels are significantly underrepresented in AI-driven search results.

According to a recent report by Skift, not a single hotel brand currently appears among the top 10 citations for travel planners in leading AI Overview search results.

This lack of discoverability and accessible information presents a significant missed opportunity for hotels to drive direct bookings with a new generation of travellers.

Hoteliers face enormous opportunity risk without an AI data and connectivity strategy. Connect AI solves this by creating a comprehensive data bridge between the hospitality industry and the rapidly expanding ecosystem of AI travel planning platforms.

When it comes to hotels, Connect AI acts as a powerful AI engine, enabling hotel chains and groups to be effortlessly discovered, comprehensively understood, and directly bookable by AI agents.

This ensures they are surfaced accurately and relevantly in AI-powered travel planning queries, with seamless, commission-free transactions.

For AI Agents & Large Language Models (LLMs), Connect AI provides a robust data layer, leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that offers AI agents and LLMs scaled access to real-time rates, availability, and rich contextual hotel information.

This empowers AI platforms to deliver highly personalised and actionable travel recommendations to their users.

Connect AI is a platform agnostic solution that will work seamlessly across multiple AI platforms such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

"We're seeing travellers increasingly turn to AI tools for trip planning, and our data shows this shift is accelerating faster than anyone anticipated," said Juanjo Rodriguez, Head of Marketing & Direct Growth Products at Lighthouse.

"According to Phocuswright research, 50 per cent of travellers plan to use generative AI for leisure travel within the next 12 months. Hotels that connect with AI platforms now will be positioned to capture more value, while those that wait risk missing this transition entirely. Connect AI helps hoteliers get ahead of this curve."

“Connect AI represents a new approach to marketing and distribution strategy,” said Sergio Zertuche, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Palladium Hotel Group, a pioneering company in the adoption of this technology.

“We see this as an exciting opportunity to connect with travellers in new ways. With the speed of AI adoption, we want to ensure our properties are discoverable and bookable when guests search through these new channels.”