COVER STORY
Fight Century
of the
BRAD BREWER OF AGENTIC HOSPITALITY SQUARES OFF AGAINST THE FORCES TRYING TO REDEFINE DIGITAL SEARCH.
By NICOLE CHASE
Y2K never had the injurious impact many thought it would, but it was around the turn of the century when hoteliers stumbled and let the proverbial barbarians through the gate, causing an irreversible way in which customers book travel.
For more than two decades, hoteliers have fought an uphill battle against digital giants that promised exposure but delivered dependence. First came the online travel agencies, or OTAs, Expedia, Booking. com, Google Travel and the like, convincing hotels that partnership meant progress. Search engines exacerbated it. Now, a new force has entered the arena: natural language.
Ask ChatGPT:“ Find me a boutique hotel in Charleston,” and the results don’ t come from a neutral marketplace. They come from the data and partnerships of whoever integrated first— usually the biggest players, with the deepest pockets. It’ s a reality that Brad Brewer, founder of Brewer Digital Marketing and Agentic Hospitality, is determined to change.
Brewer is a former web architect turned AI strategist and his aim now is to shape how hotels communicate online and interact with artificial intelligence. His company builds the underlying infrastructure connecting hotel data and content to search engines and AI platforms. He also contributed to Schema. org, the framework Google would later adopt to help the internet understand products, pricing and offers in a structured, machine-readable format. In 2015, his work was featured in the Semantic Technology Institute at the University of Innsbruck, where students used his Schema. org generator to create real-world hospitality applications— an early academic validation of his structured data technology.
December 2025 hotelsmag. com 7