The Emergence of AI
The marketing landscape has always been challenging for venue owners. It's vital to ensure your venue can be found by Google and other search engines, but it's become increasingly important to ensure that intermediaries like airbnb, Trip Advisor and Bookings.com put your business forward as well (and frustrating that they take such a big cut). Advertising and other aspects of the marketing mix fill out the picture - and the cost of getting it wrong is sky high.
But how does this change with the rapid emergence of AI assistants, like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT? Your potential customers are using these new tools in a variety of ways - not just to plan holidays and events, but also to help them manage every aspect of their lives. Everyone is trying to understand these emerging behaviours, but there are already important lessons to learn - and opportunities to seize.
Behaviour change
As with Google's famous search algorithm, the exact way that AI assistants respond to chat prompts is more than a little opaque. But what's crystal clear is that these assistants are moving into the decision layer between customers and businesses; interpreting a need, researching possibilities, comparing alternatives and increasingly handing a customer to the business only when they are close to acting.
And the growth of this usage is simply staggering. An OpenAI article from 31 August 2026 reported that ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly active users. For comparison, it reported 700 million weekly users in September 2025. And the signs are that this is increasingly a mainstream consumer behaviour, rather than something confined to young technologists or early adopters.
Travel and experiences are already one of the clearest examples of behaviour change. Booking.com conducted global research which found that 67% of consumers had already used AI in some aspect of travel. Of those people, 98% had used it for planning or booking. 37% used AI to find local experiences and cultural activities.
Smart moves
The genie isn't going back in the bottle. If anything, these trends seem likely to accelerate as users become more familiar with the tools, and the quality of output improves.
To be fair, it remains to be seen exactly how this will affect current lead generation channels. Popular tools and services such as airbnb and Trip Advisor will doubtless be affected, but they are deeply trusted brands, and people are often reluctant to change well established behaviours.
But in the meantime, for those who recognise the risks of doing nothing, or who want to capitalise on what could be a great opportunity, there are some clear steps to take.
First, it's important to ensure that detailed, AI-friendly information about your venue is available on the open web, and not hidden behind search queries or embedded within messy, complex sites like Facebook. A great, detailed listing on a reputable website is essential.
Second, it's important to consider the mental models of the potential customers using AI. For example, airbnb might support the mental model of knowing where and when you intend to be, and you're just looking for somewhere to stay the night. Flight booking and car hire tie into this mental model as well. But AI supports the full spectrum of customer needs - for example, The Antidote is designed to be found by city dwellers looking for inspiration when it comes to stress management. It's a different way of potentially arriving at the same solution, but the emergence of AI assistants and their ability to interpret any need changes the game significantly.
Third, given that AI assistants are designed to hand you directly to the business for booking at the end of the process, you need to try and ensure that the publicly available domains featuring your venue provide a direct link to a web page that you own and control, with clear instructions for fulfillment.
Where does The Antidote fit in?
We have a somewhat unique view on this, in that we would be very happy for an AI assistant to skip straight over The Antidote and deliver traffic directly to venue websites for fulfilment. In fact, that's part of our pitch - if you upgrade to the low-cost pro tier, your venue listing will be perfectly suited for AI to scrape all the information it needs. These pages were designed with AI design and coding tools specifically to be AI-friendly (might be a good time to let you know this article was written by a human, though!).
So the ideal scenario is that, if your potential customers use an AI assistant to look for recovery options, those AI assistants direct them straight to your website because the assistant found it via The Antidote.
And if you're not entirely happy with your current website, you can use your Antidote venue listing as a strong alternative. On the pro tier you can add your phone number and email address, and receive enquiries that way.
So, in the end, everyone wins - you get qualified leads, the customer finds a great option quickly, and we get a sustainable business model. The only ones who lose out are the expensive intermediaries, but I'm pretty sure they'll be fine for a good while yet..!