Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT this week. Neither will let you pay there

Radisson Hotel Group and G6 Hospitality launched ChatGPT apps this week, but neither allows in-chat payment, directing travelers to their websites to complete bookings. Radisson's app, built with Accenture, covers over 1,000 hotels in more than 100 countries, while G6's Motel 6 plugin covers nearly 1,500 economy locations in the U.S. and Canada. The move aims to capture travelers who already use ChatGPT for trip planning and to bypass online travel agencies, though Accenture research shows only 9% of consumers are open to fully autonomous purchasing.

Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT this week, a day apart and at opposite ends of the market. Radisson Hotel Group launched an app https://www.radissonhotels.com/en-us/corporate/media/press-releases/Radisson-Hotel-Group-and-Accenture-Redefine-Travel-Discovery-on-ChatGPT on Tuesday, built with Accenture, covering more than 1,000 hotels in over 100 countries. G6 Hospitality launched a plugin https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/27/3333792/0/en/Book-Your-Next-Motel-6-Stay-with-the-Motel-6-Plugin-in-ChatGPT.html for Motel 6 on Monday, covering nearly 1,500 economy locations across the United States and Canada. Neither will let you pay inside the chat. Both hand travellers to the company website to complete the reservation. Radisson says in-chat booking will arrive later, alongside loyalty recognition and an AI concierge. “AI is radically transforming how people search for and book hotel stays, and we are committed to being at the forefront of this shift,” said Gianni Di Fede, chief commercial officer at Radisson Hotel Group. The behaviour they are chasing is established. Travellers have been planning trips inside ChatGPT https://thenextweb.com/news/next-trip-you-book-online-could-be-planned-with-chatgpt for a while, and G6 cites Deloitte research showing generative AI use for travel planning has tripled in two years. Shashank Jain, global head of technology and online revenue at G6, put the shift in blunter terms. Large language models are “fundamentally changing how people interact with technology”, he said, making discovery “more intuitive, contextual and personalized”. Why they stop at the checkout The restraint reads like a technical limit. It looks more like a business decision, and it matches what consumers say they will tolerate. Accenture surveyed 25,590 people across 16 countries for its Consumer Pulse report https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/consulting/talk-my-ai-agent in June. The findings split sharply by task. Roughly three quarters would tell an agent to negotiate a deal or resolve a complaint. Just 32% would let one decide what to buy. Only 9% are open to fully autonomous purchasing. “Payments remain the biggest barrier,” the report says. Radisson’s announcement cites that same research, though a friendlier slice: 87% of travellers open to collaborating with an AI travel agent, and 71% expecting AI to influence at least half their hotel and airline spending within a year. Both figures describe influence. Neither describes payment. The real target is not OpenAI Radisson is unusually direct about the strategy. The app, it says, forms part of the group’s “broader digital transformation and direct booking strategy”. Direct booking means going around the online travel agencies. Hotels have paid commission to Booking.com and Expedia for two decades, and have contested the fees for most of them. China fined Trip.com $765m over hotel monopoly practices https://thenextweb.com/news/china-fines-trip-com-765-million-antitrust-hotel-monopoly . A ChatGPT app offers a way to reach the traveller before the agency does, then close on the hotel’s own site at the hotel’s own rate. There is a defensive reason too. Radisson says organic and direct web traffic, the channels that historically drove its online bookings, are “giving way to new touchpoints like ChatGPT”. That is a hotel group stating publicly that its search funnel is draining, then following the traffic to wherever it went. The loyalty problem The threat underneath runs deeper than distribution. Accenture’s separate agentic commerce research https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/song/agentic-commerce found that 90% of frequent AI users in North America would abandon a previously preferred brand if their assistant suggested something better. Radisson Rewards has more than 28 million members. Loyalty programmes rest on the assumption that habit beats comparison. An assistant that compares everything, every time, tests that assumption directly. Appearing in the answer has become the new shelf position, and brands have spent the past year learning how to earn citations https://thenextweb.com/news/b2b-brands-earning-citations-chatgpt-claude-ai-overviews inside AI results. Emily Weiss, Accenture’s global travel lead, named the trade-off directly. “With travel, planning is becoming easier for consumers, but more competitive for brands,” she said. Accenture frames the choice as becoming “the agent of choice” or settling for being “the choice of agents”. Both hotel groups picked the second. One firm on several sides Accenture’s position here is worth stating plainly. It published the research the release cites. It sells the MCP accelerator and AI Merchant Center that Radisson used. It designed the app experience. Ndidi Oteh, quoted in the announcement as chief executive of Accenture Song, is a named author of both reports. Accenture is also an OpenAI Elite Partner, and says OpenAI recently named it AI Transformation Partner of the Year. None of that makes the findings wrong. It does mean the numbers come from an interested party. What would make this real The pieces for in-chat payment already exist. OpenAI has worked with Visa on agentic commerce payments https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-visa-chatgpt-agentic-commerce-payments , and Stripe’s Patrick Collison has argued that agents will reshape the commerce layer of the internet https://thenextweb.com/news/stripe-collison-agentic-commerce-reshape-internet . The hotels are not waiting for any of that. They are claiming the discovery step, which is where the agency relationship begins. Two launches in two days, at both ends of the price range, suggests a checkbox rather than an experiment. The signal worth watching is the first major chain that lets you finish the booking without leaving the conversation. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.