Why 94% of Hotels Are Invisible To AI Search With Nick Slavin

Nick Slavin is the CEO and Co-founder of Curacity, a hospitality technology company that transforms media visibility into measurable hotel bookings and revenue. Under Nick's leadership, Curacity has generated $2 billion in verified bookings and revenue and established partnerships with Preferred Hotels & Resorts and The Leading Hotels of the World. The company recently launched VISTA, a platform that uses authoritative editorial mentions to improve visibility across AI search. Before co-founding Curacity in 2015, Nick served on the portfolio management team for Starwood Capital Group's $4.2 billion Opportunity Fund IX, focusing on real estate and hotel investments.

In this episode… AI search is binary, not ranked. When a traveler asks Claude or ChatGPT where to stay, the model returns a short list of hotels it recommends, and everything else effectively disappears. Slavin cites industry data showing 94% of hotels are invisible in these AI results, largely because their websites lack structured data and the authoritative third-party coverage that large language models trust. Kin Sio sits down with Nick Slavin, CEO and Co-founder of Curacity, on The Lights On Podcast to break down why most hotels are missing from AI search and how independent properties can earn their way back in.

Slavin has watched this problem take shape from the inside. Before founding Curacity in 2015, he managed hotel investments at Starwood Capital Group, including the Baccarat Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where he saw how hard it was to prove that top-of-funnel marketing actually drove bookings. That gap became Curacity's mission: connect the media and content that inspire a trip to the revenue it produces. Research the company ran with Skift found a revealing disconnect. 39% of hotel executives call digital ads one of their most effective booking drivers, while only 18% of travelers say an ad ever led them to book. Ask those same travelers about established media, and 81% say a recommendation from a trusted outlet drove a real booking.

That authority now decides who shows up in AI answers. Slavin points to data showing 77% of hotel sites lack structured data and 71% of AI recommendations come from articles and reviews rather than hotel websites. Curacity's new VISTA platform measures how a property ranks across Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, then uses the company's decade of media relationships to earn the editorial coverage that moves those rankings. For independent hotels, Slavin argues, this is the first real opening in 20 years to take share back from the OTAs, and the operators who move early build a lead that compounds.