One in three travelers now lets AI decide where to stay. Are you in that answer?
We run hundreds of real traveler queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — measure exactly how your hotel gets recommended (or ignored) — and give your team a clear plan to become the first name AI suggests in your market.
Watermelon Ghost is a GEO intelligence service for independent hotels.
We measure how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini recommend properties in your market —
then ship a 90-day execution plan to become the first name AI suggests. Every audit is run by the
three founders and delivered with a live strategy call.
Live example
When AI answers this query, who gets named?
One glance at your market. Named competitors are being recommended.
Your hotel — is it in the answer, or not?
Market
South Beach, Miami
AI query
"Best luxury hotel in South Beach"
The Setai
87% · Dominant
Faena Hotel
74% · Strong
The Betsy
61% · Present
Your hotel
? · Unknown
Illustrative example. Real audits measure hundreds of queries across four platforms.
One number that tells you where you stand — across all four major AI platforms.
We run hundreds of real traveler queries against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. The score captures how often — and how favorably — your hotel surfaces in the answers they return. A single 0–100 number, meaningful across every hotel in your market.
Competitive Analysis
The field, model by model — who gets named, and why.
For every hotel the AI recommends instead of yours, we capture the language it uses, the citations it leans on, and the sources driving its picks. You see the full competitive frame each model operates within — not just your position, but the logic behind every recommendation.
90-Day Execution Plan
Prioritized actions sequenced by impact — not theory.
A concrete 90-day playbook your team can run without a GEO specialist. Actions across content, listings, schema, reviews, and PR — each mapped to a specific model behavior it's designed to shift. With effort estimates, sequencing, and expected score impact.
Quarterly Re-Scoring
The models change. Your competitors change. You get the delta.
Every quarter we re-run the full audit and ship an intelligence brief: score movement, new entrants, model behavior shifts, and the next moves to make. You don't just track progress — you stay ahead of a market that's moving faster than any annual review cycle.
Who runs the audit
A team of three, not a self-serve tool.
Every audit is run and interpreted by the three founders — Georgina, Josh, and Leslie. Every client gets a strategy call to walk through the findings.
No dashboard. No offshore analyst pool. No PDF dumped into your inbox and left to age.
Who we build for
Independent luxury, boutique, and lifestyle hotels.
Especially members of SLH, Leading Hotels of the World, and Design Hotels.
That’s where the AI visibility gap is most commercially painful — and where positioning-language work has the biggest impact on bookings.
By the numbers
Travelers are already asking AI. The data is unambiguous.
"56% of travelers used AI for planning, booking or in-destination assistance in the past 12 months — up from 33% in early 2025."
"A quarter to a third of U.S. and European travelers are already interested in booking travel via an AI assistant — inside a chat platform or via an agentic browser."
Independent hotels competing against branded flags for the same traveler queries — where brand recognition doesn't exist to save you.
02
Urban
City hotels where neighborhood-specific searches — "hotel in Le Marais," "where to stay in Shoreditch" — decide the booking before brand loyalty kicks in.
03
Resort
Destination properties where answering "where should I stay in [region]" is the entire booking funnel — and the AI's first recommendation captures almost all the consideration.
04
Wellness
Spa, retreat, and longevity properties competing on high-intent query language — "best wellness retreat for stress" — where specificity matters more than star ratings.
05
Luxury
Five-star and Leading Hotels properties whose brand authority drives strong validation — but get out-discovered by competitors with better AI optimization.
Before you ask
The questions we get most.
Why should I trust a vendor with no long track record?
Fair question. Watermelon Ghost isn’t a first-time attempt — Josh and Leslie spent eight years building brand-visibility work for SMBs (reviews, community sentiment, AI footprint) before hospitality became the core focus. Georgina, our CEO, ran Marriott’s agency-side creative center of excellence, working directly with properties on property-level marketing. She wrote Search in Revolt, the first published GEO framework, before the category had a name. The company is new; the practitioners are not.
Who actually does the audit?
We do — the three founders. There is no self-serve tool, no dashboard, no offshore analyst pool. Every audit is run and interpreted by our team, and every client gets a strategy call to walk through the findings.
What happens after the first 90 days?
The 90-day execution plan is written for your marketing team (or your agency) to run — no engineering required for most items. If you’re on the quarterly subscription, we re-run the full audit every 90 days and ship a delta report: score movement, new competitor entrants, model behavior changes, and the next moves to make. If you’re on the one-time audit, the report is yours to run indefinitely; you can commission another audit whenever you want a fresh read.
What are your cancellation terms?
The Quarterly Subscription is a 12-month commitment billed quarterly at $900 (=$300/mo). Individual quarters are non-refundable once billed, but you can cancel renewal any time — the cancellation takes effect at the end of your current 12-month term. The One-Time Audit is a single $1,800 purchase with no ongoing commitment. Both come with a 72-hour delivery guarantee: if we don’t deliver your report on time, you get a full refund.
