Finally Someone Is Reading Your Press Releases. It's AI.
The hotel press release is one of the most reliably unread documents in the history of business communication.
Journalists delete them. Guests have never seen one. Travel editors receive approximately four hundred of them per week and open approximately three. The format hasn't changed meaningfully since someone decided that "nestled in the heart of the city" was an acceptable way to describe a building's location.
And yet every hotel publishes them. Religiously. Quarterly at minimum. Sometimes for things like the appointment of a new assistant pastry chef.
Here is the twist.
AI might actually be reading them.
Why AI reads what Google stopped caring about.
Google lost interest in press releases years ago. Too many. Too similar. Too stuffed with keywords nobody actually searches for. The signal became noise and Google tuned it out.
AI search tools work differently. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot don't just crawl your website. They look for signals across the entire open web: mentions, citations, references in authoritative publications, consistent factual information appearing across multiple sources. They are trying to build a picture of what your hotel actually is, who it serves and why it matters.
A press release distributed to a high authority open web publication — one that is publicly crawlable, permanently indexed and picked up by multiple outlets — creates exactly the kind of signal AI is looking for.
Not because AI finds press releases interesting. Because AI finds corroborated facts interesting. And a press release that lands on ten credible sites saying the same factual thing about your hotel is ten data points pointing in the same direction.
That is how AI builds confidence in a recommendation.
The problem is what your press releases are actually saying.
Go and read your last three hotel press releases. Right now. Before you brief your marketing team on the next one.
Here is what you will probably find.
"[Hotel Name] is thrilled to announce the appointment of [Name] as the new Director of [Department]. [Name] brings a wealth of experience from a distinguished career across leading luxury properties and is passionate about delivering exceptional guest experiences that exceed expectations."
Or possibly:
"[Hotel Name], a luxury retreat nestled in the heart of [City], is delighted to unveil its newly refurbished [Outlet Name], offering guests an unparalleled dining experience in an atmosphere of refined elegance."
Now ask yourself: if a traveler typed "best hotel for business travelers in [City]" into ChatGPT — would any of that text help AI connect your hotel to that query?
It would not. Because it says nothing specific about anything. It contains no facts that distinguish your hotel from any other hotel on earth. It is written in a language that exists only inside the hospitality industry — understood by nobody outside it and increasingly ignored by the machines inside it.
What AI actually needs from your press release.
Cogwheel Marketing published a useful breakdown of exactly this problem — how to write hotel press releases that work for AI discoverability rather than against it. Worth reading alongside this. The practical principles are straightforward.
Front-load the facts. Your hotel's name, location and specific differentiators should be in the first two sentences. Not your feelings about the appointment. Not an adjective. Facts.
Write for a search query not a committee. "Hotel X is a 347-room business hotel in [City] with 2,000 square metres of meeting space and direct airport connectivity" is infinitely more useful to AI than "a beacon of excellence for the discerning business traveller." One of those sentences answers a question someone might actually ask. The other one answers nothing.
Be specific about who you serve. "Meeting planners choose this hotel because" and "families travelling with children choose this hotel because" and "couples celebrating anniversaries choose this hotel because" — these phrases connect your property to actual search intent. AI is trying to match queries to answers. Help it.
Use language that lasts. AI systems don't handle time well. A press release about your summer promotion becomes meaningless noise within weeks. A press release that describes your hotel's permanent capabilities — what it is, who it serves, why it's different — remains a useful data point indefinitely.
Distribute it somewhere that actually gets indexed. A press release that lives behind a paywall or on a wire feed that isn't publicly crawled does nothing for AI visibility. Services like PR Newswire, PRWeb and EIN Presswire offer publicly accessible permanent URLs. That permanence matters — AI needs to be able to find and verify the information repeatedly across multiple sources.
The deeper problem.
Most hotel press releases are written for one audience: the person who approved them.
They use language that sounds impressive in a quarterly review. They mention things that matter internally — a renovation, an appointment, an award — without translating those things into anything a guest or an AI system would find useful.
The question "what would a traveler actually need to know about this?" is almost never asked during the drafting process.
Which is why your hotel's AI discoverability problem isn't really a technology problem. It's a communication problem that has been quietly getting worse for twenty years and is now suddenly consequential in a new way.
AI is reading your press releases. For the first time in a very long time, someone is.
The question is whether they say anything worth reading.
This post is a follow-up to Your Next Guest Is Asking ChatGPT Where to Stay — Is Your Hotel in the Answer? — a step by step guide to improving your hotel's AI search visibility.
Further reading: Does a Hotel Press Release Impact AI Discoverability? — Cogwheel Marketing
xoxo, Bored Hotelier 😉
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I write a hotel press release? A: Keep it specific and fact-led. Name your hotel, location, and what makes it different in the first two sentences. Write for a search query, not a boardroom. Avoid adjectives that could describe any hotel on earth — AI and journalists alike will ignore them.
Q: Do hotels still need press releases? A: More than ever — just not for the reasons you think. Google stopped caring years ago. But AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are actively reading them to build recommendations. A well-distributed, fact-rich press release is now an AI discoverability tool.
Q: Where should I distribute my hotel press release? A: Use services with permanent, publicly crawlable URLs — PR Newswire, PRWeb and EIN Presswire are the ones worth considering. If AI can't find and index it, it doesn't exist.
Q: Does a hotel press release help with SEO? A: Less so for Google than it used to. But for AI search visibility — yes, significantly. Consistent facts about your property appearing across multiple credible sources is exactly how AI builds confidence in recommending your hotel.