From "Gig" to "Glitch" Economy: Hospitality's New Battle Against AI Hallucinations (source: ChatGPT)
The Emergence of the Hallucinated Guest (and no, we are not discussing ayahuasca retreats...)
Last week, a client contacted me in visible perplexity:
We received a booking for a two-bedroom suite that does not exist.
There was no record to corroborate this reservation: no website transaction, OTA listing, or direct inquiry. The source was eventually traced to an obscure AI-driven booking platform, whose name we withhold for professional discretion, which had fabricated an entirely plausible yet wholly fictional description of the property. The guest arrived altogether convinced. The staff? Utterly baffled...
This incident is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a far deeper, systemic mutation. AI can no longer be conceptualized as a channel or another node in the distribution ecosystem like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, or Instagram. It has evolved into something far more pervasive, a semiotic layer, a mediating stratum that no longer transmits information but actively filters it, rewrites it, reinvents it, and, sometimes, hallucinates it.
These hallucinations are not born out of malice but rather probabilistic indifference, because LLMs do not (yet) verify facts; they predict plausible sequences of text based on statistical likelihood. When the corpus it draws is flawed, outdated, inconsistent, or incomplete, the outputs (though linguistically sophisticated) are ontologically unmoored. In other words, the system does not ask, "Is this true?" but rather, "Does this sound probable enough?"
We have now entered the era of what we call "hallucinated bookings": reservations generated not from authentic data but from machine-fabricated narratives. Guests interact with chatbots, generative search engines, and voice assistants that confidently describe experiences, amenities, and rooms that have no basis in reality, creating expectations for "never-experienced experiences". This phenomenon introduces an epistemological rupture that cannot be overstated: the widening gap between the hotel's factual reality and the plausible, polished fabrications constructed by predictive systems.
And, if today we grapple with hallucinated bookings, tomorrow we will contend with hallucinated complaints: grievances not arising from service failures but from the mismatch between synthetic expectations and actual offerings. A "glitch economy," an environment where the value of lived experience dissolves into algorithmic flows no longer entirely under human control, liquefaction of the "real" into the "plausible."
The hallucinations we observe arise from two seemingly opposite but equally dangerous forces.
On the one hand, data scarcity: when information about a property is incomplete, the model interpolates, invents, and hallucinates, much like the missing strands of dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park were filled with amphibian sequences.
On the other hand, data overabundance: when a model is flooded with conflicting or redundant information, it struggles to establish which version of reality is correct, often synthesizing an amalgam that never existed.
In both cases, the outcome is the same: a synthetic reality that confidently presents itself as authentic.
The first line of defense for hotels is relentless vigilance: a continuous audit of one's digital presence across traditional OTAs and within AI-driven environments. Today, every hospitality professional should routinely interrogate platforms like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, not to track brand mentions but to verify narrative coherence.
Beyond vigilance lies infrastructural reform. Hotels must move from managing fragmented, ad hoc information to creating consolidated, structured, and certified databases. These data repositories must be rich in content, rigorously updated, semantically unambiguous, and aligned with the property's specificities. A robust knowledge base (ideally exceeding 2,500 structured data points) is no longer nice; it is an existential necessity.
Equally crucial is the distribution layer. Much like inventory management evolved with the rise of channel managers; information management must evolve through data channel managers: systems designed to distribute verified, real-time property data across all public and private digital platforms, ensuring narrative fidelity at the point of ingestion.
The looming implementation of protocols like the Model Connection Protocol (MCP), which will allow large language models direct access to structured data repositories, makes this need even more urgent.
Finally, mitigation also requires a profound redefinition of professional roles within hospitality. We must move beyond SEO specialists, revenue managers, and brand strategists. The industry now desperately needs the emergence of a new figure: the Data Curator. A semiotic custodian is tasked with defending the consistency, coherence, and authenticity of the hotel's digital representation, ensuring that what is ingested by machines accurately reflects what exists in the world.
The guest is always right
, goes the old maxim.
Sure! But what happens when the guest's expectations are anchored not in the hotel's offerings nor their imaginations but in the synthetic fiction authored by probabilistic models?
In a landscape increasingly defined by competing plausible realities, authenticity becomes an ontological luxury and, if we fail to recognize this shift, we will soon find ourselves not simply managing online reputation but defending reality itself against algorithmically constructed hallucinations.
In other words: welcome to the Matrix...
Organization
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https://www.hospitalitynet.org
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Netherlands, The
Email: info@hospitalitynet.org
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