ChatGPT app vs hotel chatbot: the differences, the limits and which to choose

A hotel chatbot is a chat window on the hotel’s own website, and it answers guests who have already arrived there. An app sits inside an assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude and answers people planning a trip there, without their opening your site. The difference is where the guest is when they ask.

Take a family who want to know whether the kids’ club takes a 3-year-old. If they are on your website, they ask the chatbot: a product such as HiJiffy answers on the website, on WhatsApp and on social channels, and says it connects to more than 100 hotel systems, including property management systems (PMS) and booking engines. If they are comparing three hotels in ChatGPT, they ask ChatGPT, which can pass the question to your app.

Four things are sold to hotels as “AI” today. Besides the chatbot and the app there is the custom GPT, a version of ChatGPT briefed with your own texts, and a place inside someone else’s app: an online travel agency (OTA) such as Booking.com or Tripadvisor, or a direct-booking technology provider such as The Hotels Network. Our guide to ChatGPT apps for hotels explains what an app is and which groups already have one. The table sets the four routes side by side.

Every cell comes from a provider’s page or from a test of our own. The chapters below say which.

A custom GPT is the one route not to start down today, because OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs. On its page about moving custom GPTs to plugins it says it is turning them into plugins, that creating new ones will stop first, and that at retirement they will stop working. The page is written for ChatGPT Enterprise administrators and for anyone who has built a GPT. It gives no date, and warns that timings may differ on other plans.

A custom GPT is ChatGPT with three things added: instructions you write, documents you upload for reference and, if needed, “actions” that query an outside service. It never appears in a conversation unasked: according to the same page the user has to open it, or type @ and its name in ChatGPT on the web. For a hotel that means giving every guest the link.

If you already have one, the work is not wasted. Instructions and documents carry over into the plugin that replaces it. Actions do not: they have to be rebuilt as a connection to a server, the same server an app needs.

A guest reaches your hotel’s app only if they already know about it: they install it from a link or from the plugin directory, then ask for it by name. Left to itself, ChatGPT did not open ours in any of 3 tries.

On 4 October 2026, with our own app installed, we put 12 questions to ChatGPT as a traveller would, along the lines of “which Maldives resort for our honeymoon?”. In 3 of them we did not name the app: ChatGPT searched the web and the app stayed shut. In the other 9 we typed “@Lumina” before the question, and it opened the app all 9 times.

Companies that sell a shared app teach travellers the same habit. On The Hotels Network’s page the sample question starts with the app’s name: “The Hotels Network, find pet-friendly hotels in Barcelona”.

The rules point the same way. OpenAI says on its page about plugin review that a published plugin is found through a direct link or by searching for its name. In Claude, connectors in the directory can be suggested, ranked by use; connectors added by hand are never suggested.

A chatbot has no such hurdle. It is already on the page the guest is looking at.

A guest who is still choosing goes through the assistant’s web search and, among apps, through those of the big OTAs and comparison sites. The chatbot, the custom GPT and your own app come in later, once the guest has your name.

On 3 October 2026 we put 6 travel questions to an OpenAI model inside Codex, OpenAI’s tool for developers, which shows what the model goes looking for. It was free to search for a plugin to suggest. It did so for none of the 6, not even for “hotel in Paris under €400”: it searched the web.

When we asked it outright whether a plugin existed, it searched a short catalogue: about 150 of the 3,915 plugins we had counted in the public directory on 2 October. Three of them were for travel: Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Skyscanner. Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt did not come up even when we searched for them by name. We measured this in Codex; OpenAI does not publish how ChatGPT decides what to suggest to someone chatting.

The public directory, meanwhile, is crowded. On 8 October 2026 the Travel category of ChatGPT’s plugin directory held 387 listings, and 81 had the word “hotel” in the name or subtitle. The subtitles make the same two promises again and again: search and book.

So a guest who has never heard of you meets you in the pages the assistant reads, and in the OTAs’ apps if you sell there. In our study of 3,288 answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, carried out in August 2026, questions about the trip named one of the world’s 50 best hotels in 189 of 1,380 answers. The guide on how to get your hotel on ChatGPT explains how to get into those answers.

Inside the chat the guest sees a card of 527 × 480 pixels, set between the lines of the conversation. On your own website you decide how big the chatbot’s window is; in the chat the assistant decides.

We measured it between 4 and 6 October 2026. In ChatGPT anything that does not fit in 527 × 480 pixels scrolls inside the card; in Claude ours measured 467 × 445. ChatGPT’s enlarge button opens a panel beside the chat about 370 pixels wide, even in a window 1,440 pixels wide.

On 4 October we tested, one at a time, what a card can do in ChatGPT. Photos work, as do a silent video that starts by itself, a map, scrolling sideways and down, and buttons that send the assistant a follow-up question. The card can also fetch fresh data from the server, when the guest changes the dates for instance, without the assistant writing its answer again. Copying to the clipboard, the phone’s share menu and picture-in-picture video do not work. To let a guest share something you need a link to a page on your own website. In Claude, YouTube videos do not load.

The assistant is where the time goes. On 6 October we timed each kind of request to our server: 0.6 to 4 seconds. In our tests of 4 October, though, the complete answer in ChatGPT took 12 to 67 seconds to arrive, because the model has to read the data and then write. We followed one question from version to version, about a family with two children: on 6 and 7 October, once we had cut what we give the model to read, it came down from 2 minutes 50 seconds to 42 seconds. ChatGPT without the app had taken 1 minute 32 seconds.

Inside the app you can neither advertise nor take payment for a booking: OpenAI’s guidelines forbid advertisements and require the purchase to be completed outside, on the seller’s own website. Payment inside ChatGPT, which OpenAI calls Instant Checkout, is in beta with a few selected marketplaces. A plugin’s directory listing may not announce discounts or promotions.

The apps we looked at follow the rule. ALL Accor, announced on 29 January 2026, searches in the chat and sends the traveller to the ALL platform to book. Booking.com’s listing invites you to tap “View on Booking.com”. The Hotels Network says in its frequently asked questions that the booking takes place on the hotel’s website.

None of these rules applies on your own website. There the chatbot can show a visitor an offer and take them to the booking engine. That is the biggest practical difference: in the app the guest finds out and chooses; on the website they book.

Three things change between a branded app and a shared one: the name the guest sees, who receives their questions and who maintains it. In the plugin directory, read on 8 October 2026, and on the providers’ own pages we found five ways for a hotel to be there.

The second row is the least known. The directory has five listings in the name of one hotel or a small group, Hotel Emperador Madrid, Hotel Moderno, Hotel Liabeny, Porcel hotels and Gloria Palace, and on every one the developer shown is Mirai, the booking engine provider. The Emperador’s listing says the assistant checks availability and helps to make, change or cancel a booking. We have not tested it.

The third is the app The Hotels Network launched on 4 March 2026. The provider advertises a flat fee with no commission on bookings, thousands of hotels in one app and no change to the hotel’s systems. It also builds apps under other names: on the listing for Preferred Hotels & Resorts, a collection of independent luxury hotels, the developer is The Hotels Network. SiteMinder says the booking engine its customers use appears in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude through a partner’s app, DirectBooker, which is in ChatGPT’s directory. Kismet is taking names for a waiting list for hotel-branded apps.

One point about data is worth knowing before you sign. Under every listing ChatGPT warns that it may share “relevant chats and memories” with the app. They go to whoever publishes the app: in a shared app, the provider. The pages we read do not say what then reaches the hotel, and none gives a price. Those are the two questions to put to the provider: how much of that data will I receive, and what does it cost?

The choice depends on how many hotels you have and where your guests ask their questions. For every hotel the work starts with written answers, which all four routes rely on.

Marriott introduced Ask Bonvoy on 16 June 2026: a natural-language search on Marriott.com and in its apps, in beta and in US English, which answers only from the group’s own data. It also has the Marriott Bonvoy plugin in ChatGPT’s directory. A group does both at once; an independent hotel can get there through the providers it already uses.

To see a card, you can use our app. You add it by hand, in a minute, from the page that explains how to use Lumina in ChatGPT and Claude. It is not yet in ChatGPT’s public directory: the package has been ready since 7 October 2026, and OpenAI has still to verify our company’s identity. The guide to MCP and direct bookings explains how an app connects to the booking engine through a protocol called MCP. Our development brief lists what to ask whoever builds your app.