Hotel site wants ChatGPT to lead guests to pay for day stays

What's new

The US company HotelsByDay, which sells hotel rooms by the day, has published figures on how many bookings come from AI assistants like ChatGPT. According to the company, AI-referred bookings grew 422 percent from September 2025 to August 2026, compared with the previous 12 months. A day stay is a room you rent during the day, for example for work, rest or a breather between two flights.

The share of all bookings coming from AI referrals rose from 2.1 percent in September 2025 to 13.8 percent in September 2026, according to the company. Looking at September alone, there were 558 percent more AI-referred bookings than a year earlier. These are two different periods, so the two figures should not be confused. The company also says the conversion rate for AI-referred visitors rose 152 percent. That means more of the people who land on the site end up buying. However, it does not say over what period or relative to what.

In November 2026, the company showed a demo: An employee used ChatGPT to find a day stay at a hotel in Miami and got all the way to the payment page.

What's smart

On the payment page, the room price, taxes and fees were ready, so the guest could complete the payment themselves. In other words, you don't have to click around several pages to find the final price.

HotelsByDay emphasizes that it offers full online payment for eligible day stays, so the room price, taxes and fees are covered without separate booking fees.

Note that the demo does not show a booking that happens fully automatically inside ChatGPT. The assistant leads the user to the payment step, and it is the guest who presses the button. The sources do not say whether an official ChatGPT app or integration exists.

CEO Yannis Moati says travelers are already asking ChatGPT where to stay, and that the next step will be asking ChatGPT to book, for example a flight to Chicago the next day.

Cheaper or better?

The price of day stays has not been disclosed, and it is unclear whether the service is cheaper than its competitors. The only pricing promise is that no separate booking fees are added on top.

The figures come solely from HotelsByDay's own press release and have not been independently verified. No absolute booking numbers have been disclosed either, so the growth percentages may reflect a small starting point. It is easy to get high percentages when you start small.

Among AI assistants, ChatGPT is the largest source of referrals, according to the company, followed by Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot.

What it's good for

The service is for people who only need a room for a few hours: the business traveler with a long wait between two meetings, the tired air passenger or someone who needs a quiet place to work. Starting with a question to an AI assistant and ending up on a payment page is a convenient shortcut.

HotelsByDay was founded in 2015, is headquartered in New York and, according to the press release, covers more than 4,000 hotels in over 16 countries. The company started with about 10 hotels, expanded to the UK in 2019 and to Latin America in 2024. It earns money from commissions from hotels that sell vacant rooms during the day. Whether the service is available in Denmark or the rest of the EU is not stated in the sources.