ARA Travel Study — Q2 2026. Brand Intelligence for the travel and hospitality industry, using the four frontier AI models as the traveller.

377 placements · 4 models × 16 queries, top-7 answers per cell · naming variants merged before counting.

Ask a machine to plan your next trip and it answers with names. Which airline, which hotel, which booking site — a short, confident list. That list is the new shelf, and most travel brands have no idea whether they're on it.

In the second quarter of 2026 we asked the four AI assistants people actually use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity — the questions a real traveller asks: the most trusted travel brand, the hotel with the most legendary service, the brand that's genuinely different from the rest. Then we recorded every brand they named, every time they named it.

They named 187. The biggest holds 4% of the shelf. 130 were mentioned exactly once. No airline, no hotel group, no booking platform owns the surface where travel decisions increasingly begin — which means, for now, it can still be claimed. Each slice below is one brand; hover any of them for its share and where it appeared.