In China, you can now ask a chatbot where to stay and book the room without leaving the chat. It’s a glimpse of how the rest of us will be choosing hotels soon. The question worth asking is who the chatbot is really working for.
Ask a friend where to stay and you get an opinion. Ask a travel agent and you get an opinion with a commission attached. Ask a chatbot and, until recently, you got something that felt neutral: a calm, confident list with no obvious salesman behind it.
That feeling is about to be tested. ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, has turned its AI assistant into a hotel booking channel, and it takes a cut of every room it sells.
What’s actually happening in China
The assistant is called Doubao. It’s China’s most-used chatbot, with around 382 million monthly users as of May, according to Hospitality.today, citing QuestMobile.
You describe the trip you want, Doubao suggests hotels, and you book them inside the conversation. Doubao holds no rooms itself. The booking goes through ByteDance’s own platforms, Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and the reviews app Dianping.
It’s working. Over China’s October holiday, Douyin reported hotel orders through Doubao up more than 56% on the previous month, according to Brands Without Borders. Douyin didn’t say what that growth was measured from.
Since 20 August, every completed booking has carried a fee of about 12%: an 11.4% “software service” fee plus 0.6% for payment. That replaced the roughly 8% hotels paid before. On a 500-yuan room, the hotel now hands over around 60 yuan instead of 40.
The catch: a salesman with a friendly voice
ByteDance insists the commission doesn’t change the advice. Doubao’s head of PR says hotels can’t pay for a better position. “Every hotel’s place in the answer is set by what the traveler asked,” as Hospitality.today put it.
That may be true. But it’s ByteDance’s own promise, and nobody outside the company can check it. A few details are worth noticing:
- Hotels can’t easily opt out. According to the Chinese outlet Huxiu, cited by Hospitality.today, a hotel can’t simply leave the Doubao channel. It has to apply, under criteria Douyin hasn’t published.
- The price isn’t always the best one. Spot checks against Trip.com and hotels’ own websites came out mixed.
- The fee is no bargain for hotels. At around 12%, Doubao sits in the same 11–13% range a Shandong hotel manager said the big booking sites charge.
Chinese travellers have started asking the obvious question. MarketWatch’s headline on 26 October said the chatbot is giving travel booking sites “a run for their money. And yours”, noting that consumers are beginning to wonder whether AI travel agents have a hidden agenda.
The old travel agent had a commission too. The difference is that you knew you were talking to a salesman.
It’s already heading this way
This isn’t only a Chinese story. Since October 2025, Expedia and Booking.com have had apps inside ChatGPT that show live hotel and flight prices without leaving the chat, as Short Term Rentalz reported. Skift’s hands-on test in July found Booking and Expedia ads had started appearing in ChatGPT results too.
The West has one difference already. ChatGPT sells sponsored placements in Europe, according to Hospitality.today, so here the paid slot is at least out in the open. In one US sample from July, Booking.com took six in ten of the travel slots.
And where does the “advice” come from in the first place? Mostly reviews. In a 19 October snapshot by search consultancy Qvery, ChatGPT cited Tripadvisor in 51.9% of US travel answers that named a source. Google’s AI Mode cited it in 23.9%, but its hotel and restaurant answers mostly pointed to Google’s own listings.
How to use a chatbot without being sold to
None of this means AI is useless for planning a trip. It’s quick, it’s tireless, and it’s good at the dull bits. Just treat it like a well-read stranger with a sales target, not a friend.
- Use it to research, not to decide. Ask for options, opening dates, transfer times, the shape of a place. Then make the choice yourself.
- Ask where it got that. If the answer leans on review sites or a single booking platform, you’re reading recycled reviews with better grammar.
- Check the price somewhere else. The hotel’s own website often matches or beats the platform rate, and booking direct puts you on the hotel’s radar.
- Notice what’s missing. A chatbot can only recommend what’s listed, reviewed and bookable. The small, owner-run places that don’t pay platform fees rarely make the cut.
That last point matters most. The places worth crossing a continent for are often the ones an algorithm can’t see: the castle with seven bedrooms, the villa that only takes bookings by email, the hotel that never bothered with a booking engine. Finding those still takes someone who has actually been.
The last word
The chatbot will get better at telling you where to stay. It will also get better at selling you a room. For now, it pays to remember that the friendliest voice in travel is also the newest salesman.
Read next: Alone in a 16th-century Scottish castle, the kind of stay no chatbot would have sent me to. For more stories like this, see The Shortlist, five hand-picked stories worth knowing.
