AI Trip-Planning Surges — and Systematically Steers Clients Away from Boutique Wellness
Two studies published this week converge on a single uncomfortable truth for the wellness travel segment. More than half of UK travelers now use AI to plan trips — up 12 percentage points year-on-year, the sharpest adoption curve in Europe — but the properties those tools surface are precisely the wrong ones for wellness advisors. A Lighthouse analysis of 4,545 ChatGPT hotel prompts found AI recommendation coverage as low as 10–13% of total supply in major cities, and the properties that do appear are almost entirely OTA-distributed chain hotels. That is the structural inverse of the boutique wellness model. Properties like Six Senses, COMO Shambhala, Chiva-Som, Kamalaya, and members of the Healing Hotels consortium minimize OTA dependence by design — which renders them invisible to the primary discovery channel their affluent target demographic now uses. Advisors have a concrete, data-backed case to make to AI-savvy clients: ChatGPT will not find the retreats that are actually right for them. That gap is the advisor's value proposition, now quantified.