First among 50 hotels. Yet absent from 46 of 80 AI answers.
We measured how often four leading AI assistants recommend Grand Hotel Pomorie when people search for the best places for balneotherapy and medical spa care in Bulgaria.
What the check found
We compared all 50 hotels in Bulgaria certified by the Ministry of Tourism as a “balneotherapy (medical spa) centre”.
We put 20 prompts, in Bulgarian and English, to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity — 80 answers in total.
Grand Hotel Pomorie ranks first among every hotel studied. The brand already carries strong recognition.
But first place does not make the result good enough. The hotel appears in only 34 of 80 answers. In the other 46 a prospective guest is pointed somewhere else.
Which AI assistants know the hotel
The results differ sharply depending on which AI assistant the guest uses.
The Perplexity result is especially telling. This AI searches for current information online and shows the sources on which it bases its answer.
Gemini and ChatGPT include Grand Hotel Pomorie in their recommendations fairly often. With Claude and Perplexity the hotel is almost absent — the brand’s AI visibility is not yet consistent and depends on the assistant.
Which sources shape the AI recommendations
Across the test Perplexity drew on 228 citations from 120 different sources. The most frequently cited are travel intermediaries, specialist media and competing hotel brands.
Not once is Grand Hotel Pomorie named among those 228 citations.
Only one of all the cited sources is devoted directly to balneotherapy in Pomorie. It is published by Hotel Sveti Georgi — a direct competitor in the same town.
What this means for Grand Hotel Pomorie
More and more people reach for an AI assistant at the very start of their search — which hotel is best, where the balneotherapy is good, which place suits a particular condition. If the hotel is not among the answers, many people never reach it at all.
In 46 of the 80 answers studied, Grand Hotel Pomorie does not make that first shortlist. Competing hotels, travel intermediaries and booking platforms are recommended instead.
Medical spa tourism usually means a longer stay, a full course of treatments and guests who may return every year. A missed recommendation can therefore mean a long-term guest lost.
Where the problem lies
The problem is not the quality of the hotel, the treatment or the service.
Grand Hotel Pomorie has a serious history, medical expertise and some of the strongest natural assets for balneotherapy in Bulgaria.
The problem is that this information is not yet presented in a way every AI system can readily find, understand, verify and use in its recommendations.
An AI does not know a hotel the way its guests do. It relies on publicly available information and on the sources it judges clear and reliable enough.
Right now competing hotels and travel intermediaries send more legible signals and are used as sources more often.
What has to change
The aim is not simply for Grand Hotel Pomorie to be mentioned more often. The aim is for AI systems to clearly understand:
That information has to be clear, detailed, consistent and corroborated by enough reliable sources.
Then an AI will not merely recognise the name Grand Hotel Pomorie — it will understand why the hotel deserves to be recommended.
Grand Hotel Pomorie already ranks first among all 50 hotels studied.
The next step is making that recognition consistent — whether the prospective guest uses ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or any other AI assistant.
The goal is for the hotel not merely to appear in the answers, but to be among the first and most confidently recommended hotels for balneotherapy and medical spa care in Bulgaria.
How we ran the study
All 50 establishments certified as a “Balneotherapy (medical spa) centre” in the National Tourism Register of the Ministry of Tourism as of 25 July 2026.
Claude Sonnet 4.6, ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Gemini Flash and Perplexity Sonar.
10 prompts in Bulgarian and 10 in English to each AI model. All were national in scope, naming no particular town, so no hotel gained an advantage from its location.
“What is the best medical spa hotel in Bulgaria?”
We checked every variant of the Grand Hotel Pomorie name — Cyrillic, Latin and transliterated. Only clear, specific mentions of the hotel were counted.
We used the citations Perplexity displays alongside its answers.
Research by Brand Design Ltd., July 2026. The full data, including all 80 answers in their original form, is available on request.