Dubai Hotels: Who AI Recommends to Travellers

We built a corpus of 135 questions a real traveller would ask an AI assistant while planning a Dubai stay: best hotels by occasion, by area, family resorts, luxury stays, deals and dining. Each question was sent to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the full run was repeated a second time to measure stability. Every answer was parsed for specific hotel and resort names. Visibility is the share of all answers in which a property is mentioned.

Recognisable beachfront resorts win. Atlantis The Palm leads every engine and dominates family questions, where it appears in half of all answers. Burj Al Arab owns the luxury category (36% of luxury answers). Position matters too: when Atlantis The Palm is mentioned, it is named first 59% of the time, while Burj Al Arab is named first only 22% of the time it appears. In total 121 different properties were named at least once, but the top 10 capture most of the attention.

Each engine has its own taste. Claude leans hard into the icons: Atlantis The Palm at 27% and Four Seasons at 23.7%, far above other engines. Gemini spreads mentions wider and is the only engine that pushes Centara Mirage into the top tier (11.9%). ChatGPT favours Jumeirah Al Naseem (13%) which barely registers elsewhere. For a hotel marketer this means one number is never enough: you can be highly visible on one engine and absent on another.

We ran the identical 675-question sweep twice. The hotel sets matched only 46.6% of the time. AI answers are sampled, not looked up, so visibility should be treated like share of voice in advertising: a probability you can grow, measured across many answers, not a fixed position you hold.

Engines that cite sources rely on a surprisingly narrow set of sites. Tripadvisor is the single most cited domain by a wide margin, followed by Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Agoda. Social and community sources matter too: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit all appear in the top ten. Editorial lists from the Michelin Guide and Conde Nast Traveller round out the picture. If your property is weak on these surfaces, you are weak in AI answers.