ARA Hospitality Brand Consultancies Study — Q3 2026. Brand Intelligence for the hospitality design and strategy sector, using the four frontier AI models as the buyer.

385 placements · 4 models × 15 buying questions · specialists in colour, every other firm in a stepped grey · naming variants merged before counting.

A hotel group needs a brand. A restaurant portfolio needs repositioning. The person tasked with finding the firm to do it now opens a chat window before they open a shortlist — and the machine answers with names.

In the third quarter of 2026 we put the buying questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity: who to hire for a hospitality group's brand strategy, which consultancy is best at brand architecture for a hospitality portfolio, who is best at repositioning a tired hospitality brand, which is the most respected hospitality brand consultancy in the world. Then we recorded every firm they named, every time they named it.

They named 173 firms across 385 placements. The seven largest holdings all belong to global generalist brand agencies, Landor, Interbrand, Pentagram, Lippincott, Siegel+Gale, FutureBrand, Wolff Olins. Not one of them is a hospitality specialist.

The eleven specialist firms we audited — the ones who do this work all day, only in hospitality — hold 5.2% of the shelf between them. Landor alone holds 9.6%. Three of the eleven are never named at all.

One detail worth its own line: Landor's position was hidden until we merged it. The models split the firm across its current name and its former one, Landor & Fitch, and neither half looked like a leader. Whole, it is the biggest firm on the shelf by a distance. A firm that cannot be resolved to one identity is smaller in the machine's answer than it is in the world — which is precisely the problem the specialists have, at a fraction of the scale.