How Competing Platform Actors Frame a Disruptive Technology: A Dyadic Analysis of Generative-AI Risk Disclosure by Hotels and Online Travel Agencies

Abstract

Hotel executives publicly describe generative AI (GenAI) as their route out of dependence on online travel agencies (OTAs), while OTAs treat the same technology as a threat to be absorbed. The emerging disclosure literature cannot detect this opposition because it pools structurally heterogeneous firms into a single cross-section. This paper asks whether hotels and OTAs frame GenAI differently in their mandatory risk disclosures, and how those frames evolve. This paper analyzes SEC annual-report risk-factor disclosures (FY2019–2025) from a matched dyad of four hotel operators and three OTAs—49 filings, on Form 10-K and, for one foreign private issuer, Form 20-F—combining keyword-anchored extraction, manual thematic coding, cross-firm cosine similarity, and reproducibility-tested stance coding. Three findings emerge. GenAI language is dyadically differentiated in theme: rival-capability framing is exclusive to the OTA side (11 of 51 OTA passages versus none of 24 operator passages), while operator language is dominated by deployment-liability and compliance content (58 versus 28 percent). Firm-specific language nonetheless converges toward common legalistic phrasing within three reporting cycles. And stance is threat-leaning from the moment GenAI enters these filings and intensifies thereafter: threat framing accounts for roughly two-thirds of stance-bearing passages in FY2023 and rises to almost ninety percent by FY2025, while opportunity framing stays flat. The single seven-firm dyad yields illustrative rather than generalizable findings. Yet rivals’ annual filings are public, auditable competitive intelligence: OTAs now name supplier-direct and AI-mediated discovery as threats—precisely the opening hotels pursue. A disruptive technology, this evidence suggests, is not merely disclosed but strategically framed from opposing structural positions, and the intensity of its threat framing tracks its competitive salience.