Skift Global Forum Preview: IHG’s Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer on Making Hotels Legible to AI
Skift Take
Heather Balsley is making IHG legible to the AI models while arguing the models will never own the guest. Two bets, one strategy, at Skift Global Forum.
When a traveler asks an AI assistant where to stay, the hotels it names are the ones whose content the model can actually read. IHG is rebuilding for that moment. Heather Balsley, the group’s Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer, joins Skift Global Forum on September 22–24, 2026, to explain the content overhaul behind it, and why she still believes the assistant that surfaces you can’t own the relationship that keeps you.
Earning the AI Recommendation
Skift: As AI starts deciding who gets recommended and who doesn’t, what have you had to do differently to earn a spot in that recommendation?
Heather: AI tools can only be as helpful as the content they’re drawing from, so content has become increasingly important. Travelers are asking AI more nuanced questions about where they should stay based on their specific needs, preferences and trip purpose. That means hotel content needs to go beyond basic descriptions and amenities. It needs to be rich, accurate, and relevant so AI can understand what makes a property unique and connect it with the right guest.
That’s an area where we’re making significant investments. Later this year, we’ll introduce a new platform that will transform how we structure and manage hotel content, making it easier for it easier for hotels to promote and showcase their properties. The goal is to ensure the right hotel information is showing up on the right channels at the right time, all while strengthening the digital signals that help our hotels to be surfaced and recommended by AI tools. Just as importantly, the platform will give us greater flexibility in how content is created, delivered, and personalized. As traveler expectations continue to evolve, that’s going to help us provide more relevant information and better match guests with the experiences they’re looking for. Ultimately, we need to clearly communicate the value and experience each hotel offers and make it easy for travelers to find the stay that’s right for them.
Skift: The customer journey keeps getting longer and more fragmented. How has your thinking changed about traveler choice and how your company curates products and offerings?
Heather: The guest journey is definitely evolving, but in many ways it’s becoming more streamlined.
AI is quickly becoming a new front door to travel planning. Whether it’s generating destination ideas, helping build itineraries, or narrowing down hotel options, travelers are turning to AI to simplify decisions and reduce the amount of time and effort required to plan a trip. At the same time, more travelers are discovering, researching and booking within a single mobile experience rather than moving across multiple devices and platforms.
What hasn’t changed is that travelers still want confidence they’re making the right choice. Expectations for convenience, personalization, and speed continue to rise, so we need to make it easier for guests to find the right stay for their needs, whether they’re traveling for business, leisure, or something in between.
For IHG, that means continuing to invest in a broad portfolio of brands, a powerful loyalty ecosystem, and digital experiences that help remove friction across the journey. There’s a lot of choice out there, so the goal is to deliver our offering in a way that feels relevant and personalized, making it easier for people to find the right stay for their needs.
Why the Channel Won’t Decide the Winner
Skift: The pace of change is only increasing. When you’re trying to make a decision, what’s the actual test or rule you use?
Heather: My test is simple: does this create a better experience for guests while also delivering value for owners? Technology will continue to evolve, but those fundamentals don’t change. If something helps travelers make more confident decisions, reduces friction, strengthens loyalty, or improves hotel performance, it’s worth pursuing. If it doesn’t, it’s probably a distraction.
Skift: What is one area that the travel industry doesn’t discuss or pay attention to enough?
Heather: There’s a lot of focus right now on how AI and new platforms are changing the way travelers find and evaluate their travel options, and that’s an important conversation. But I think it’s equally important to recognize that new discovery channels don’t replace direct relationships with travelers.
We’ve seen a similar pattern in the past. The rise of online travel agencies, mobile booking, and super apps in markets like China all changed how travelers discovered and engaged with brands. Those shifts created new opportunities and new challenges, but they didn’t diminish the importance of strong brands or direct customer relationships.
I see AI and emerging discovery platforms following a similar path. People may increasingly rely on AI assistants, social platforms, and other tools for inspiration and recommendations, which is why IHG is present wherever travelers are making decisions. That’s a critical part of staying relevant, but what ultimately drives long-term trust are things like personalization and recognition through our loyalty offering coupled with consistently great stays.
AI may transform how guests find us, but brands that consistently deliver meaningful experiences and strong relationships will continue to earn their business in the long run.
The Questions Worth Pressing
- Content as the visibility play: IHG is rebuilding its hotel content into structured, machine-readable form, with a new platform arriving later this year, so the models surface its properties. The bet is stated before the proof, and it raises whether optimizing for the models is a durable edge or unpaid work for platforms that can rewrite the rules anytime.
- Disintermediation: Heather reads AI as the next OTA-and-mobile shift, disruptive to discovery, survivable for brands. The sharper question is whether this one breaks the pattern, since an AI assistant can answer the guest and close the trip without the hotel ever surfacing.
- Loyalty as the moat: her long-game answer rests on personalization and recognition through the loyalty program. That’s the asset she’s betting outlasts any discovery channel, so it’s worth asking what loyalty has to become when the guest never touches the brand’s own front door.
- The owner-and-guest test: a move must serve both guests and owners or it’s a distraction. Clean as a rule, but the interesting cases are the ones where guest experience and owner economics pull apart, and her answer doesn’t say which wins.
Hear from Heather Balsley alongside Booking Holdings’ Glenn Fogel, Expedia Group’s Ariane Gorin, and more of the industry’s top CEOs, live at Skift Global Forum, September 22–24 in New York, now just days away.
Facts Only
* Heather Balsley is the Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer of IHG.
* IHG is introducing a new platform later this year to restructure and manage hotel content.
* The Skift Global Forum takes place September 22–24, 2026, in New York.
* The forum features speakers including Glenn Fogel of Booking Holdings and Ariane Gorin of Expedia Group.
* IHG is investing in a portfolio of brands and a loyalty ecosystem.
* The new content platform aims to make hotel information machine-readable for AI tools.
* AI assistants are being used by travelers for destination ideas, itinerary building, and narrowing hotel options.
* Travelers are increasingly using single mobile experiences for discovery, research, and booking.
Executive Summary
IHG is pivoting its digital strategy to ensure its properties are "legible" to AI models, recognizing that AI assistants are becoming a primary entry point for travel planning. By launching a new content management platform later this year, the company aims to move beyond basic descriptions toward rich, structured data that allows AI to match specific guest needs with unique property attributes. This technical overhaul is designed to increase the visibility of IHG hotels within AI-driven recommendations.
Despite this investment in discovery channels, IHG maintains that AI will not replace the necessity of direct brand relationships. The strategy posits that while AI handles the initial filtering and recommendation process, long-term customer retention is driven by loyalty programs, personalization, and the physical experience of the stay. There remains an inherent tension between the convenience of AI-mediated booking and the brand's desire to maintain a direct connection with the guest, though the company views this as a continuation of previous shifts toward OTAs and mobile booking.
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative is that IHG is pragmatically adapting to a new technical reality: in an AI-first world, "visibility" is no longer about SEO keywords but about structured data legitimacy. By treating AI as another discovery layer—similar to the rise of Expedia or mobile apps—IHG is attempting to decouple the *discovery* of a room from the *ownership* of the guest relationship.
The underlying paradigm is one of "defensive adaptation." The unstated assumption is that the current relationship between brands and guests is durable enough to survive a layer of total AI mediation. This echoes the historical struggle against Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), where brands fought to reclaim the customer from the middleman. However, the root cause of the current anxiety is the potential for "invisible" transactions, where an AI assistant completes a booking without the guest ever interacting with the brand's interface.
This shift potentially diminishes human agency by narrowing the "serendipity" of travel to the biases of a model's training data. While IHG benefits from increased efficiency, the cost may be a further homogenization of the travel experience, where hotels optimize for "AI legibility" rather than authentic character.
Patterns detected: none
If this were a coordinated influence campaign, the playbook would involve "inevitability framing"—convincing the industry that AI mediation is an absolute law of nature to force competitors into expensive, reactive infrastructure spending. The current content does not match this pattern; it is a standard corporate strategic preview.
Bridge Questions:
1. If an AI assistant manages the entire journey from inspiration to booking, does a "loyalty program" still function as a moat, or does it become a backend utility for the AI?
2. How does optimizing content for machine legibility change the way hotels actually operate on the ground?
3. What happens to smaller, independent hotels that cannot afford the technical infrastructure to be "legible" to these models?