Radisson and Accenture Put a Hotel Group Directly Inside ChatGPT — IHG Did the Same Thing the Same Day
Radisson Hotel Group launched an Accenture-built AI discovery app inside ChatGPT as IHG rolled out its own conversational search, both racing to defend direct bookings as guest research shifts into LLMs.
Radisson Hotel Group and Accenture launched @RadissonHotels inside ChatGPT on July 28, letting travelers search more than 1,000 Radisson properties across 100-plus countries through natural conversation — “family-friendly weekend stays in Amsterdam” returns live inventory, rates, and interactive maps before routing the booking back to Radisson’s own site. The build ran on Accenture’s AI Merchant Center and an MCP-based accelerator to structure Radisson’s content and inventory data for reliable AI retrieval. Accenture’s own Consumer Pulse Research, cited in the announcement, found 87% of travelers open to using an AI travel agent and 71% expecting AI to influence at least half their hotel or airline spending within 12 months.
IHG wasn’t waiting to see how that landed. The same day, IHG launched its own US beta of AI conversational search across IHG.com and the One Rewards app, covering more than 7,000 hotels in 19 brands, building on an app IHG had already shipped inside ChatGPT. Two of the industry’s larger groups moved on the same lever in the same week — a signal this isn’t experimentation, it’s a race.
The urgency behind both moves is sitting in data both companies are implicitly responding to. Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti disclosed on Wyndham’s Q2 earnings call that roughly 60% of the company’s guest travel searches now happen inside an LLM rather than a search engine or OTA — a discovery shift large enough that Wyndham built its own native ChatGPT app specifically to keep that demand from routing through an intermediary. Radisson and IHG are making the identical bet: if guests are already asking ChatGPT where to stay, the brand that isn’t structurally present in that conversation loses the booking before its own website ever gets a visit. The open question isn’t whether to build this — three major groups already have — it’s whether a mid-market or independent operator can get inventory AI-discoverable without an Accenture-scale integration budget behind it.
Source: Accenture Travel Hospitality — Radisson Hotel Group and Accenture Redefine Travel Discovery on ChatGPT Auto-generated brief — verified before publishing.