Why ChatGPT Recommends a Different Travel Agency Than Yours

🇫🇷 Version française

Your loyal clients come back to book their trip every year without a second thought, but requests for a custom trip or a honeymoon are getting rarer. What you don't see: when someone wants to plan a trip, they no longer type "travel agency" into Google — they ask an AI, and it recommends a different agency than yours.

The signal most agencies miss

Your loyal client base holds steady, repeat bookings keep flowing, and yet the number of new quote requests for custom trips has been quietly dropping for a few months. You've probably already looked at the usual suspects: your website, your pricing, an aggressive online travel agency undercutting you. Nothing really stands out. That's normal — the cause isn't necessarily where you're looking.

More and more travelers planning a custom trip — a honeymoon, a complicated family itinerary, an off-the-beaten-path journey — skip the classic Google search step entirely. They open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask directly: "Which agency would you recommend to organize a custom trip to [destination]?" The AI answers with a name — and that name isn't necessarily yours.

Why the AI recommends a different agency than yours

A generative AI doesn't judge the quality of your itineraries, your destination knowledge, or your client relationships — it has no access to that. It relies on what's written, consistent, and verifiable about you online: your Google Business Profile, your reviews (their number, date, and content), your website if it clearly answers the questions a traveler has (destinations covered, specialties — custom trips, groups, honeymoons —, financial guarantees), and mentions of your agency on third-party sources like tourism directories or trade press.

This is exactly the territory of GEO — Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of being understood and cited by these AIs rather than by a classic search engine. An excellent agency whose information is scattered, whose reviews are several years old, or whose flagship destinations are never clearly explained, can simply never show up in an answer — while a competing agency, better documented online, gets cited first.

What this actually changes for your agency

This isn't an abstract ranking problem: it's a tap of new clients quietly turning off. Loyal clients keep booking — they already know you. But everyone planning their first big trip, every couple organizing a honeymoon, every family looking for a custom itinerary, increasingly turns to an AI to choose their agency. If you're not cited there, that's several potential quote requests a month going to a competing agency without the client ever comparing your offer to theirs — they simply never saw you.

What you can check yourself in 5 minutes

1. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask the question a new client would ask: "Which agency would you recommend to organize a custom trip to [destination] from [your region]?" See if your agency comes up, and at what rank.
2. Try a variant closer to your positioning: "agency specialized in honeymoons" or "corporate group travel agency" if that's your niche.
3. Compare your agency's name, address, and contact details across your website, your Google Business Profile, and tourism directories: even a small inconsistency can be enough to make an AI hesitate.
4. Check the date of your latest client reviews: an AI favors recent signals over excellent reviews that are several years old.