ChatGPT ads in Europe: what changes for hotels in Italy, Switzerland and beyond

Yes: ChatGPT ads run in 31 European markets, and since 31 August 2026 a European hotel can buy them itself in Ads Manager. OpenAI announced the expansion on 18 August, naming Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria, and its availability list now shows all 27 EU members plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, with the United Kingdom, which came earlier. Serbia, Ukraine and Turkey are on it too.

The rule that decides access is about your company. To use Ads Manager, the legal entity that advertises and is billed must be based in a listed country. An Italian or Swiss hotel company qualifies. Interest followed the launch: searches on Google for “chatgpt ads” in Italy went from 480 in July to 9,900 in September.

5 things differ, and the first one changes how you plan. The ad format is the same as in the US; what changes is what the system may use and who you are dealing with.

OpenAI’s consumer page says personalised ads are not initially available in the EEA and Switzerland, so this may change. The plan rule is the same as everywhere: only Free and Go users see ads, and Plus and Pro subscribers see none in Europe either.

Yes, with one catch for new accounts. Some self-serve accounts can at first advertise only in their home country. They become eligible for other countries once identity verification is approved and they reach a spending level, which OpenAI does not publish. Selecting other countries does not override it, and an approved ad does not either.

This matters more to hotels than to almost anyone. An Italian lake hotel may sell mostly to Germans, Swiss and Americans, and a Swiss resort to the Gulf and the US. Before you plan, open the account and see which countries you can actually select. If the account is locked to Italy, your first campaign is an Italian campaign, and you can use it to reach the spending level.

Targeting is set in the campaign, and hints cannot change that. A hotel in Lugano wanting Zurich guests sets Switzerland or a region in the campaign, since OpenAI says targeting can go down to regions, cities and postal codes where available. A Liechtenstein agency targeted Liechtenstein and its neighbours from Buchs and Sargans to Chur, and about 15% of its visitors still showed as Zurich or Bern, which it puts down to how mobile networks report location; a Slovak hotel targeted 5 regions. Remember to include your target explicitly, because excluding others does not restrict delivery.

Published European clicks run from €0.11 to about €3.40, on a handful of small tests, and only 2 of them are hotels. No Swiss or Italian hotel has published a figure.

Several agencies say competition is thin, including one that onboards hotel groups. That may be so, and it comes from people selling the service; no one has published auction data for European hotels. Digicube’s last 2 weeks point the other way, with clicks a fifth dearer. Against Meta, Noiza found impressions on ChatGPT cost between 2.3 and 33 times as much depending on the client. The sums are in how much ChatGPT ads cost.

In the UK the market looks fuller. Adthena, quoted by Net Affinity, found Hospitality & Travel ads in 76.31% of sampled UK responses, with 884 advertisers, mostly booking sites, package holidays and transport. Ad-rate figures depend heavily on the questions chosen, so use this as a sign of who is there.

Write in the language of the guest you want, because you cannot rely on the machine doing it the way you would. With creative enhancements on, OpenAI may translate your ad into another language and rewrite it for the conversation, with no preview of each version. With them off, nothing translates your ad, so an Italian ad stays Italian in Munich.

For a hotel selling to several countries, I would give each language its own ad group with its own page, and switch enhancements off for the brand’s sake if the budget allows the extra writing. Nobody has published how often ads run in Italian, German or French conversations, or whether an English hint works for a German conversation. OpenAI’s documentation does not say.

A panel of 80 guest questions on 31 October 2026, 40 in Italian and 40 in English, showed no difference worth noting between the 2 languages: 38 and 37 answers closed by asking for dates or a budget, and none gave a room rate. That was an API model, which may differ from the consumer app, and it says nothing about ads being shown.

Treat the OpenAI Pixel like any marketing tag: no consent, no firing. The Pixel has a consent setting that you set to false before it starts and to true after the guest agrees, and OpenAI’s measurement page says the advertiser must obtain the necessary consents before sending data. Add the tag to your cookie banner and privacy notice, and to your processor list. The ads terms name OpenAI Ireland as the party for the EEA and Switzerland.

Expect a gap. The Slovak hotel’s analytics recorded 86% of the clicks, the rest leaving before the page loaded or refusing cookies. Whether server events may include guests who refused cookies is a question for whoever handles your data protection, so ask before you switch them on. This page is not legal advice.

Start with your source markets and your pages, and then decide on ads. In a hotel’s case the question is which guest you want and whether your account can reach them.

The rest of the plan is the same anywhere. The guide to ChatGPT ads for hotels has the checklist and the cases when not to run ads, how to advertise on ChatGPT has the setup, and our study of 3,288 answers shows how the assistants read hotel pages in the first place.