AI for Vacation Rentals: Adopt or Go Extinct

I don't post this to say "I told you so." I post it because the warning still applies — most of this industry is exactly where the broader market was when I hit record.

The proofWhat I said then — and the numbers now

When I filmed this, roughly a third of organizations were using generative AI. It sounded like a lot at the time and I told you it was only the beginning. Here's the same measure, two years later.

A second, independent measure tells the same story from the ground up: the OECD found business AI use more than doubled, from under nine percent in 2023 to about twenty percent in 2025. Whichever yardstick you trust, the direction is identical — and it's the direction I pointed at on camera. This wasn't a lucky guess. It was the pattern, read early.

The openingOur industry is still where the world was two years ago

Now the part that should get every owner reading this out of their chair. While the broad economy raced from a third to nearly three-quarters, the lodging and accommodation sector barely moved — official data still puts AI adoption here below fifteen percent, among the slowest of any industry. Sit with that. The rest of the business world doubled. Vacation rentals are, on average, right about where everyone else was the day I filmed the warning.

That is either terrifying or it's the best news you'll read this year, depending entirely on which side of it you choose to stand on. Because a slow-moving field is exactly where an early mover wins biggest. The advantage isn't gone. Most of your competitors haven't reached for it yet.

The playbackEvery piece of the 2024 video — where it landed

I walked through the near future in that video. None of it stayed hypothetical.

The chatbots. I said conversational AI would move from novelty to how people search and decide. It did — hundreds of millions of people now use AI chatbots, and ChatGPT alone counts its weekly users in the hundreds of millions. That's not a gadget anymore. That's a channel.

The avatars and automation. Here's the part most people missed at the time: the video you just watched was itself delivered by an AI avatar — in early 2024. I wasn't only predicting AI presenters; I was already using one to deliver the warning. The wave I pointed at has a name now — "agentic AI," systems that plan and carry out multi-step work — and it's the single biggest trend in the field this year.

The business tips. The practical uses I pushed — using AI to draft your content, handle repetitive guest questions, and mine your own reviews and data for what's working — are now standard practice for the operators who are pulling ahead. Not exotic. Just done.

The instructionWhat to actually do about it — this quarter

A warning without a next step is just noise, so here's the step. Adopting AI as a vacation rental business splits cleanly into two jobs, and you need both.

The first is using AI to run leaner — drafting listing and destination content, answering the questions you answer fifty times a week, reading your reviews and booking data for patterns you'd miss by hand. That's the efficiency half, and it starts paying immediately.

The second is newer, bigger, and almost nobody in this industry is doing it: making sure that when a traveler asks an AI where to stay, your rental is one of the handful it names. That's a discipline of its own — generative engine optimization — and it's where the next decade of direct bookings gets decided.