Your next middleman is a machine

Do you know what a customer's AI assistant says about your business when they ask it to find the best option and book it?

Not what your website says. What the agent says.

It reads your prices, your availability and your reviews, compares them with everyone else's, and makes the call. Your customer may never see your homepage at all.

It is tempting to file this under next year. It is closer than that.

In April this year, Visa launched a platform built so that businesses can take payments started by AI agents. In June, a Checkout.com report found that merchants in the UK and US put only three percent of transactions through AI agents today, yet eighty-nine percent are already preparing for it.

The same research found fifty-seven percent of consumers would let an agent switch brands if it found better value.

That last number is the uncomfortable one. The loyalty you spent years building is exactly what the agent will trade away for a better price.

Most owners still file this under somebody else's problem.

Decide what the agent sees

Hotels have already lived this. Online travel agencies got between the operator and the guest.

They owned the search, they owned the customer's details, and they charged commission for the privilege. By the time most operators noticed, the pricing power had moved with the relationship.

An AI agent is the same intermediary with a new face. It does not have a favourite. It has a query.

That changes what you work on. An agent can only compare what it can read, and it can only trust what turns out to be true.

If your facts are missing, stale or buried in a PDF, it recommends whoever made theirs easy to check. So the fix is to decide now what the agent sees, and to keep a reason for the customer to come to you directly.

• Make it readable. Prices, availability, inclusions and policies in plain, structured form, the same on every channel. If a person has to ring to find out, an agent will not bother.
• Make it accurate. A wrong rate or a sold-out date showing as open is an annoyance to a person. To an agent it is a reason to drop you from the shortlist.
• Tend the reviews. The agent reads all of them, including the ones you never answered.
• Keep a direct reason. Something a customer only gets by coming to you — a better member rate, a person who remembers them, a standard nobody else will match.

Visibility gets you compared. A direct reason gets you chosen.

The honest objection is that intermediaries work. They bring volume you would never reach alone, and walking away from them is its own mistake.

The aim is not to refuse the middleman. It is to avoid depending on one.

Listed everywhere, you get the volume. Dependent on one, you get their terms.

Hilton spent its biggest campaign buying guests back

In February 2016, Hilton launched "Stop Clicking Around". The Drum reported it as the biggest global campaign in the company's ninety-seven-year history.

The message was simple: book direct on Hilton.com. Members got discounted rates and free Wi-Fi for doing it.

Marriott followed within weeks. In March 2016 it announced member-only rates for guests booking through its own website, app and call centres, under the banner "It Pays to Book Direct".

Then, in April, Hilton's chief executive Chris Nassetta spoke at the World Travel and Tourism Council summit in Dallas and, as Skift reported, called the online travel agencies good partners.

Read that as a war on the travel sites and you have misread it. Neither company walked away from them.

What they were doing was paying — in advertising and in discounted rates — to buy back a relationship they had let someone else hold. Two of the biggest hotel companies in the world could afford that bill. Most businesses cannot.

The cheap time to decide who holds your customer is before the middleman does.

Why I am recommending it

I learnt this one the expensive way, and I have worked like this ever since.

I learnt it as an owner-operator of serviced apartments and a venue, with full profit and loss responsibility. The online travel agencies filled rooms we would not have filled on our own. I would not run a property without them.

They also sat on the profit and loss statement as a commission line that never went away.

A guest who booked through a platform was ours for the stay, but the relationship stayed with the platform. We got the booking. They kept the customer.

So I stopped treating a listing as something the platform managed. Every listing got the same rates, the same accurate availability and the same attention to reviews as our own channel. And every guest who walked through the door got a reason to book with us directly next time.

That is exactly the discipline an AI agent demands. The only difference is that the agent will check your homework faster than any guest ever did.

Do this before Friday

Open the AI assistant your customers are most likely to use. Ask it to find what you sell, in your area, and pick one to book. Read what it says about you — the price, the availability, the reviews it picks out.

Write down every fact it gets wrong, and fix the first one by Friday.

Then write one sentence: the reason a customer gets by coming to you directly. If you cannot write it, that is the real work.