Marriott Goes All-In on AI in Loyalty — 50% of EMEA Travelers Now Plan Trips with AI

I spent Friday morning rereading a number that does not sound revolutionary until you sit with it: fifty percent. Half of EMEA travelers — fully half — now say they have used AI to plan or research a holiday. The data point comes from a Mortar survey commissioned by Marriott across 22,266 adults in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, released this morning and picked up by Skift the same day. Twenty-six percent in 2023. Forty-one percent in 2024. Fifty in 2025. That is not adoption — that is a phase change.

The contrarian thesis I want to plant here is unfashionable inside hotel marketing decks, where AI is still framed as a “channel” alongside metasearch and OTAs: AI trip planning is no longer emerging. It is mainstream. And Marriott, of all chains, is responding the way a hyperscaler would — by treating its loyalty app as the surface area where that mainstream behavior lives. The Bonvoy app is becoming an operating system. The points are almost a side effect.

Half the continent does not need your homepage anymore

Read the Mortar numbers without the hotel-industry filter for a moment. Fifty percent AI usage, doubling roughly every twelve months from a 2023 baseline of one in four, with 79% of respondents intending equal-or-more travel in 2026. This is the curve every consumer category secretly wants and almost none get. It is also a curve that quietly cannibalizes the traditional top of the booking funnel.

If half of your prospective guests are framing their search inside a chatbot — describing the trip in natural language, asking for shortlists, comparing properties through a conversational layer — then the screen real estate that mattered for twenty years (the chain homepage, the metasearch grid, the OTA card) becomes a downstream artifact. The decision has already started somewhere else. The hotel that wins is the one whose inventory, rates, room types and loyalty perks are legible to whatever model the guest is talking to, and whose own app can pick up the conversation when the guest lands.

That is the part of the Marriott announcement that I think is being underweighted. The press release talks about AI in search, AI at the front desk, AI inside Bonvoy. Skift frames it as “AI and loyalty perks to meet evolving traveler behavior.” Mark this as interpretation, not reporting: I do not think these are three initiatives. I think they are one initiative described three times. The throughline is that the Bonvoy app has to become the place where the AI-planned trip is consummated — search inside it, check-in inside it, on-property requests inside it, perks redeemed inside it. The 50% number is the permission slip to invest as if that future has already arrived.

The Bonvoy app as operating system

Operating system is a load-bearing phrase, so let me earn it. An OS does four things: it abstracts the hardware, it brokers identity, it mediates between applications, and it stores state across sessions. Translate that into hospitality.

Abstracting the hardware: the guest does not care that the property is a Westin in Frankfurt or an Autograph in Marrakech. They care that the room is quiet, the wifi works, the loyalty status carries. An AI-mediated app can present that uniformly, hiding brand-and-system fragmentation that a guest would otherwise have to navigate.

Brokering identity: this is where loyalty actually matters in 2025. Bonvoy is the persistent identity that lets the chain follow the guest across the planning-to-stay arc. If half of EMEA travelers begin the trip in a chatbot, the chain that has the loyalty ID has a much better shot at re-entering that conversation than the chain that does not.

Mediating between applications: a stay is not one app. It is housekeeping, F&B, spa, concierge, billing, and a half-dozen third-party experiences. An AI layer inside Bonvoy can route those requests without making the guest learn six interfaces.

Storing state: this is the quiet superpower. The guest who told the AI in March that they prefer high floors, decaf in the room, and a 6am wake-up — that state should exist in October. Marriott has talked publicly about AI deployments that touch exactly this surface; I covered it in a forthcoming May piece on the front-desk and ops layer, and the EMEA loyalty announcement is the consumer-facing complement.

The risk in framing all of this as “AI plus loyalty perks” is that it makes the work sound like a marketing program. It is not. It is platform work. The perks are the visible bait; the invisible part is the data model that makes the perks deliverable in a world where the guest never visited marriott.com.

What I will be watching

Three things. First, whether the 50% figure holds and grows in the 2026 Mortar wave, or whether AI planning plateaus the way voice search did. Second, whether Marriott opens any meaningful API surface to the model providers — there is a version of this future where the chain that distributes its inventory most legibly into AI assistants wins disproportionately, the same way mobile-first chains won disproportionately a decade ago. Third, whether competitors respond at the app layer or only at the search layer. The search layer is the cheap response. The app layer is the real one.

Fifty percent is the kind of number that retires a debate. The debate about whether AI planning is a fad is over. What replaces it is the harder question — what does a hotel app look like when half its prospective guests arrive having already had the conversation somewhere else.

— Hana edits the newsroom for TableTransfers. Tips: tips@tabletransfers.com.