For several days, I kept thinking about the last idea I had written down at the end of the previous conversation. If an initial idea could help organise everything the hotel showed, the next question seemed inevitable: where did that identity really live? At first, I assumed it would be enough to return to the homepage and read it a little more carefully.
I did so a couple of times. I went back through the welcome copy, looked again at the main photographs, reviewed the room descriptions and returned to those parts of the site where, apparently, the hotel had chosen to present itself. Yet the more I searched for the idea capable of organising all that communication, the clearer it became that it was not concentrated on any particular page.
That surprised me more than I expected. For many years, I had thought of the website as the place where a hotel built its identity and, in a sense, I still believed that. No other space offers quite as much freedom to decide what to say, how to say it and in what order to present it. But I was beginning to discover that contributing to the construction of an identity was one thing; containing it entirely was something else.
The further I went, the more obvious it became that I was not looking for a particular piece of copy. I was looking for an idea. And yet that idea seemed to slip away whenever I tried to identify exactly where it began. It was not contained solely in the welcome message, a photograph, a room description or the way the gastronomic experience was presented. It appeared in fragments across all of them, although none could contain it on its own.
As I continued through the site, I remembered something that, until then, had seemed almost incidental. The first time that former guest sent me his conversation with an artificial intelligence, the answer had not been built solely from information taken from the hotel’s website. It included references to the surrounding area, mentions of the hotel’s style, other travellers’ opinions and descriptions that probably came from very different places. That recommendation did not belong to any single source. It was the result of many voices speaking at the same time.
So I looked at the hotel again, but this time I decided to leave its own website. I opened its business profiles, went through the reviews, looked at how booking platforms described it, read some media coverage and examined references published by tourism organisations. For the first time, I stopped looking at each of those spaces as though they were independent pieces. I began moving from one to the next, trying to understand whether they were all talking about the same hotel.
That was when I understood something I had never put into those words before: no hotel exists on the Internet as a single narrative. It exists as a conversation.
That realisation changed the way I looked at a property’s digital presence once again. Until then, I had thought the task was to evaluate a website. Now I could see that what I actually had in front of me was a much broader system, made up of dozens of pieces that influenced one another. Some were under the hotel’s control. Others belonged to guests, the media, booking platforms or institutions that had probably never imagined their words would also take part in constructing that identity.
The Anonymity Test, therefore, could not be limited to the official website. A hotel could express an idea with remarkable clarity on its own site and yet convey something entirely different when the other sources began to speak. Digital identity was not the result of a well-written text or a good photograph. It was the coherence that remained when all those voices came together in the same conversation.
Until then, I too had thought of a hotel’s digital presence as a collection of different channels. The website on one side, reviews on another, booking platforms, business profiles and specialist media all seemed to operate according to different logics, each with its own metrics, responsibilities and objectives. That afternoon, I began to suspect that the real work had never consisted solely of managing them separately, but of ensuring that, beneath it all, they ended up telling the same story.
That idea also changed the way I understood recommendations generated by artificial intelligence. For a time, I had imagined that those answers depended primarily on an algorithm. Now I was beginning to see that they also depended on the coherence of the information that algorithm found scattered across different sources. Artificial intelligence does not construct a hotel’s identity. It reconstructs it. And it can only do so with the pieces it finds.
That distinction proved decisive. I stopped looking for a hotel’s identity on a single page and began observing how it appeared, disappeared or changed as different sources entered into dialogue with one another. The initial idea we had discovered in the previous conversation was not written in any one place. It had to be reconstructed from a collection of scattered signals. The next step in the method, therefore, would no longer be to read a website more carefully, but to learn to listen to a conversation that had always been there, even though until then I had not known how to recognise it.
Management Perspective
A hotel’s digital identity does not live in a single channel. It emerges from the coherence with which its website, reviews, business profiles, booking platforms, the media and tourism organisations participate in the same story.
The Case Study
In the next conversation, we will begin reconstructing the identity of the boutique hotel we have been observing in much the same way an artificial intelligence might: bringing together the signals scattered across its digital presence to see whether they all speak of the same property or whether, instead, they construct different narratives.
A Question Before Moving On
If you removed your hotel’s website for a moment, would the other sources available online still tell the same story about your property?