MCR Hotels CEO Wants AI Booking Agents Blocked — and Can't Figure Out How

Only 10 of 50 major hotel brand websites explicitly address AI crawlers in their robots.txt files — and MCR Hotels Chairman and CEO Tyler Morse, one of the loudest voices demanding a block on AI booking agents, admits he has no idea how to do it. "I can't figure out how to do it," Morse said on Wednesday, November 11, at the Skift Commerce Summit in New York.

His motive is commercial, not legal. Morse wants to stop personal AI agents from booking rooms at his hotels because software cannot be upsold.

Why ban a customer that books rationally?

Travel merchandising, as Morse described it, is built to trigger impulse purchases. Hotel sites and apps are packed with strategic upsell offers aimed at human emotions. An AI assistant shops differently.

AI agents "make more rational decisions," Morse said. Rational buyers resist the splurges that drive ancillary revenue.

His reasoning sets him apart from United Airlines, which announced its own ban on AI bots the same day. The carrier cited data privacy and regulatory risk. Morse cited the loss of persuadable customers.

"Everyone is going to ban the agents because it's in their interest to do so," Morse predicted.

Takeaway: the fight over AI bookings is about who can be sold to, not who owns the data.

Can hotels actually block the bots?

In practice, no — at least not yet. Morse conceded he lacks a technical mechanism to keep AI agents off his booking channels.

Skift's own review of the top hotel brand sites underlines the gap: just 10 of 50 explicitly address AI crawlers in robots.txt files. The industry's defenses against automated booking remain largely unwritten.

Takeaway: hotel groups are threatening a ban they currently cannot enforce.

Who wins the AI distribution layer?

Morse expects paid placement inside AI recommendations to replace Google-style sponsored links. Suppliers will bid for visibility in what an AI agent suggests, much as they bid on search today.

He sees a dominant AI intermediary emerging — naming players such as Anthropic or OpenAI as likely candidates — and he expects online travel agencies to win "on the margin" thanks to their customer bases and technology budgets.

Hotel operators, by contrast, lack comparable research departments and tech spending. The U.S. industry alone is fragmented across 42,000 owners of 65,000 hotels, which limits any coordinated response.

The money at stake is large. Skift Research put global hotel distribution costs at roughly $105 billion in 2023, with about $75 billion of it flowing through indirect channels — the layer where AI intermediaries would sit.

Morse said OTAs will not surrender their position easily.

Takeaway: the next commission battle will be fought over AI answer placement, and hotels enter it underfunded and fragmented.

The open question is whether suppliers can build the technical defenses — and the collective bargaining power — before AI agents become the default way travelers book.