Can a hotel advertise on ChatGPT? I tried it with mine

Yes, any Italian hotel can do it now — has been able to for a few weeks. On 18 August ChatGPT Ads rolled out across 31 European countries, Italy included, and from 31 August the platform is self-serve: no agency, no OpenAI sales team. All you need is a website and a credit card.

I read through the documentation, got my head around how it works, and at that point there was only one question left: for a hotel like mine, in Arezzo, does it actually make sense? The only way to find out was to open Ads Manager and try. Here's how it went.

How advertising inside ChatGPT works, in brief

Ads appear below the response, in a separate box, clearly labelled as sponsored content. They don't get woven into the text ChatGPT writes. If someone asks "a hotel with a pool near Arezzo" and the assistant recommends three options, none of those three has paid to be there. The ad, if there is one, sits underneath and it's obvious it's something else.

Targeting isn't keyword-based the way Google is — it works on conversational intent. The advertiser provides "context hints," and the system decides whether the ad fits that particular chat. If you've ever worked with Google Ads, the structure will feel familiar: campaign, ad group, ad, and either impression- or click-based models.

Three things to know before you start:

• ads are only shown to users on free plans (Free and Go); paying subscribers don't see them;
• in Europe, for now, personalisation is off: the ad attaches only to the current conversation, not to the user's history;
• they don't appear in temporary chats, and they don't appear alongside sensitive topics — health at the top of that list.

It writes your first ad for you

The onboarding flow is designed for people who have never run advertising before. It asks for one thing: your website address. You type in www.aschotel.com, press a button, and for a few seconds the screen says "I'm thinking."

Then the ad arrives, already done. In my case it pulled two themes from the site — "hotel in Arezzo for athletes, teams and smart travellers" and "stays with pool, gym and coworking" — grabbed the pool photo, and wrote: "Arezzo for athletes. Pool, padel and gym for your stay."

I'll be honest: not bad at all. It's what I would have written for a starter campaign, and it worked out the hotel's positioning in three seconds.

Anyone who's read the piece here on how to optimise a hotel for AI search will know why: if the site says clearly what you are, the machine reads it. If it doesn't, the ad comes out generic — and that's not the machine's fault.

The recommended plan, and where you need to pay attention

After the preview comes a screen labelled "Here's your recommended plan." Read every line, because two of the six settings were wrong for me.

The proposed plan was:

• objective: clicks;
• locations: United States;
• destination URL: the homepage;
• strategy: maximum results;
• daily budget: $100.

Hit "Continue" without looking and you're spending $100 a day to be seen in Denver.

I changed the locations, brought the budget down to €25 a day (the minimum allowed), and left everything else as it was.

What happens after you hit "Continue"

You land in the actual Ads Manager, which looks more like Meta's than Google's: clean, sparse, campaigns, groups, ads, billing. The campaign is there, but it's in a "not delivering" state for two reasons.

The first is that your business needs to be verified. A yellow banner at the top of every page reminds you, and without verification ads can start but then get paused. The second is that the ad generated during onboarding doesn't automatically land inside the campaign — it asks you to "add creative content." A small gap in the flow, the kind of thing you'd expect from a platform that's been live for two weeks.

There's also a promotion: spend €500 before 24 September and receive €500 in credit. Classic move to get people to try the platform, and for a small property it's the thing that makes the experiment worth running.

Verification isn't done by OpenAI but by Persona, a third-party provider that checks the business exists and isn't on any sanctions list. A window opens in English and the first thing it asks for is an EIN or TIN — the tax codes for American companies. Next to that, a box inviting you to "switch to individual" if you don't have them.

But press on, indicate Italy as your country, and the form completely changes face: it asks for the Italian things — codice fiscale (tax code) or numero REA (company register number), VAT number with the IT prefix, website, sector and registered address.

What it costs and what to expect

On cost-per-click I have no numbers yet — the campaign hasn't spent a euro and I'm not going to make figures up. What I can say is what I set: €25 a day, click objective, one month's trial. If the promotion gets applied, the test costs me half.

On what to expect, my reasoning goes like this. Someone who goes to ChatGPT and types "looking for a hotel in Arezzo where I can bring my squad, with a pool, half board and flexible times for training sessions" is giving me far more information than someone who types "hotel Arezzo" into Google. That's the kind of guest I want, and they say it in a single sentence.

The doubt is about volume. How many people in Italy ask that question on ChatGPT, on a free plan, in a month? Seeing as in Europe we only basically started with these campaigns yesterday, I genuinely don't know what to expect — and I'm curious, honestly.

Is it worth trying?

If you have a clear positioning and a site that says so, yes — with a test budget. Not to replace Google, at least not now, but to understand in time whether this becomes a real channel, and to have your own data when someone, in a year's time, comes pitching you an "AI advertising" package.

If your site is a generic shop window with "comfortable rooms in the heart of Tuscany," wait. The ad will come out as generic as the site, and the €25 a day is better spent fixing the copy.

On these pages we've written about how Meta has overtaken Google in digital advertising and what that changes for anyone selling rooms. ChatGPT Ads is the third table opening up, and for once a small hotelier can sit down on day one, with the same tools as the big players. In a month I'll tell you whether the spend actually brought anyone to sleep here.

*cover image generated with AI