Marriott launches Ask Bonvoy, an AI-powered search tool

Marriott has today announced the launch of “Ask Bonvoy”, a conversational AI search tool that allows Marriott Bonvoy members to search for hotels using plain-English questions rather than the traditional filters and dropdown menus that hotel booking sites have relied on for as long as I can remember.

The tool is currently in beta and rolling out to a subset of members, with a full global rollout planned for later in 2026.

What we’re told this does

The basic idea is quite simple. Instead of typing “Barcelona” into the search box on Marriott.com, selecting 2 adults, check-in 10 July and check-out 14 July from the menus and calendars and then manually filtering by price, brand, and amenities, members can ask something like “find me a hotel in Barcelona with a rooftop pool that’s walkable to the Gothic Quarter” and get results back in a conversational format.

The tool searches across the whole of Marriott’s portfolio (10,000+ properties, we’re told) and is, by design (and rather obviously), limited to Marriott’s own inventory.

There’s no suggestion that it will help you find the best hotel in Barcelona regardless of brand – it will help you find the best Marriott-family hotel in Barcelona. Period.

It’s available through the Marriott Bonvoy desktop site and app, currently in English only, with other languages to follow as part of the broader rollout.

The business logic

The reason Marriott is doing this isn’t hard to figure out. The company wants to keep as much of the booking process as possible within its own ecosystem, away from online travel agencies and, increasingly, away from other, independent, AI-powered search tools that might offer up results that include a Hilton or a Hyatt alongside a Marriott property.

By directing users to use “Ask Bonvoy”, Marriott believes that, as people pivot to using AI to search for vacations more and more, it has a greater chance of keeping them on its own platform from initial search through to booking. And that should be good for margins as it means that Marriott doesn’t have to pay anyone a commission.

Marriott is not alone in pursuing this. Hilton and IHG are reportedly building their own conversational AI search tools, which suggests the major hotel chains have collectively decided that doing otherwise risks being left behind.

Whether any of them will build something good enough to change booking habits is a separate question (I don’t know anyone who’s using AI to book vacations, but then perhaps I’m just out of the loop!)

Thoughts

AI-powered search tools in travel have been announced with considerable fanfare several times now, and the gap between what the press release trumpets and what the actual product has turned out to be like has often been significant.

Marriott notes that the tool is launching “in beta”, which is entirely reasonable from a testing standpoint, but it’s also a way of managing expectations about what the tool can and cannot do.

Early versions of similar tools at other companies have struggled with anything more complex than simple queries, so it will be interesting to see how powerful (or useless) Ask Marriott turns out to be.

It’s probably also a good idea to wonder what “conversational AI search” actually adds for a Bonvoy member who already knows roughly what they want. Is this something people need or something we’re just being told that we need?

If you’re a regular Marriott traveler looking for a Marriott hotel in a city you know well, the existing search tools work fine – I’m able to filter by price and see if a property is close to somewhere I want to be just by using the tools we already have on the Marriott app and desktop site.

But if the tool is genuinely well coded and, in particular, if it is capable of performing reward night searches, I can see how it could be useful.

Being able to type something like “show me all the properties from Marriott’s luxury brands, in France, Italy and Spain, that can be booked for 85,000 points or less between 8 and 20 September” and to then get a meaningful set of results would be a genuine step up for Marriott fans (especially those with an 85k free night certificate to use).

I can also see how the tool may be useful for casual travelers who, for whatever reason, are broadly happy staying at any Marriott Bonvoy property and just want a bit of help in narrowing down the options.

I’m not sure anyone should be relying entirely on an AI tool to narrow down their search all the way down to one specific property (I see AI getting far too many simple things wrong on a daily basis to trust a model implicitly, so I’d want to do my own research as well), but it could be a useful starting point.

All that being said, if all this turns out to be is a tool that can’t handle award searches and that is really only a replacement for all the filters that we already have on the app and the desktop site, this will go down as just another pointless and expensive gimmick.

In the end, it’s all going to come down to just how capable Ask Bonvoy is actually going to be and we’re not going to know the answer to that until quite a few people have spent quite a bit of time using it and putting it through its paces.

Bottom line

Marriott has launched a conversational AI search tool which, it says, allows members to search for hotels using natural language. It’s in beta, US English-only for now, and, unsurprisingly, limited to Marriott’s own portfolio.

The business logic is clear – Marriott wants to get ahead of any potential AI booking craze and to make sure that it keeps as many bookings as possible on its own site and app.

Whether the tool itself is good enough to be worth using is, however, something we’ll have to wait and see, and as I don’t appear to be part of the beta test, I’m going have to rely on others to tell me what it’s like.

Any readers seeing this on Marriott.com or the Marriott app?