Case Study

We asked five AI travel planners to recommend hotels in Bali. Out of 50 properties audited, only 6 appeared in any recommendation. The average AI Travel Score was 14 out of 100. The remaining 44 hotels were functionally invisible, meaning travelers who use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, or Grok to plan their Bali trip will never discover them. This is the first region-specific AI visibility benchmark for Bali’s hotel market. The findings confirm a pattern we have documented across 343 hotels in 12 countries: the vast majority of independent hotels lack the digital signals AI needs to recommend them. But the Bali data tells a sharper story, because Bali is one of the world’s most competitive leisure destinations, and its hotels are losing the AI distribution game at an alarming rate. ...

Tour operators face a brutal commission problem. Platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide charge 25-30% on every booking, and for most operators those platforms account for the majority of revenue. When a Costa Rica-based adventure tour company came to palmtree.ai, they were handing over nearly a third of every dollar earned to aggregators while their own website sat collecting dust. Forty-five days later, three out of five AI engines were citing them for “best adventure tours in Costa Rica.” Direct website bookings had jumped 280%. Monthly commission savings: $3,800. ...

When the owner of a 24-room boutique eco-lodge in Ubud, Bali reached out to palmtree.ai in early 2026, the situation was frustrating but familiar: a beautifully curated property with five-star guest reviews, yet completely invisible to every major AI travel engine. Eighty-five percent of their bookings came through Booking.com at a 22% commission rate. Not a single guest had ever arrived through an AI recommendation. Sixty days later, the property was being actively recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. Direct bookings had increased 340%. Monthly OTA commission savings hit $4,200. ...

A 12-tent luxury tented camp in Kenya’s Masai Mara had a problem that most safari lodges don’t even know exists: AI travel engines couldn’t find them. No mentions in ChatGPT. Nothing from Perplexity. A single, lukewarm reference from Gemini. Zero booking inquiries traced back to AI-powered travel planning. Within 90 days, Mara Sunrise Camp went from an AI Travel Score of 15/100 to 78/100, got recommended by all five major AI engines for “luxury safari Kenya,” and generated 23 direct booking inquiries from AI referrals in Month 3 alone, with an average booking value of $4,800. ...