Luxury hospitality has the most complex influencer equation in consumer marketing. The audience precision requirement is extreme, the permanent record matters most, and the AI citation record for top properties is built from sources the brand doesn't fully control.
Wikipedia is the single most consistent source AI travel engines cite. The hospitality sector spends billions on SEO and almost nothing on Wikipedia maintenance — and the math has flipped.
How hotels build loyalty in the AI-engine era — by anchoring guest decisions to emotion before they ever reach the booking page. The four emotional triggers, the storytelling layer, the Marriott reference case, and what compounds inside answer engines.
Hospitality PR earns its budget when it moves bookings. Brand identity that survives review sites, crisis comms built for hospitality-specific incidents, media relationships that move the right audiences, community presence, influencer programs that convert.
A 2012 Q&A with Brian Fitzgerald of O'Rourke Hospitality on hotel digital marketing — preserved as historical reference, with a 2026 view on what stayed true and what the AI engine era rewrote.