Martinhal Family Hotels & Resorts

Founded by entrepreneurs Chitra and Roman Stern, Martinhal is helping more families have a holiday together to remember at their four Portuguese properties: Martinhal Lisbon Oriente,  Martinhal Quinta, Martinhal Sagres and Martinhal Chiado. Each Martinhal Family Hotels & Resorts’ property is designed with families, comfort and design in mind, and offers superb accommodation in some of the most prestigious locations in Portugal, from beachfront locations and sophisticated golf areas to Lisbon city centre. 

• The façade of Martinhal Lisbon Oriente was designed with sustainable living in mind. The landscaping of the façade was done with great care - in total, there are 172 olive trees on the façade alone and 770 planters of varying dimensions containing 58 species of shrubs, bushes, herbaceous plants and grasses. The retaining wall for the building, which blends into the park next door has a further 65 species of trees, bushes, climbers and other plants - making this an impressive vertical garden outside the Terrace restaurant.
• The building’s smart monitoring system and weather API actively monitors and reduces energy and water consumption, and solar panels help to power the entire property.
• Martinhal chose the site for not only the opportunity to build upon the legacy of the Park of Nations but because the district is built on a sustainable energy system. “Climaespaço”, which is a centralised heating and cooling system, distributes hot and cold water through a four-pipe system across the whole district.

Here's a question worth sitting with as a family-focused property: when a parent opens ChatGPT and types "best family resort in Portugal" – where does your hotel appear?

For most brands, the honest answer is: nowhere. They've spent a decade optimising for a version of search that's quietly being replaced underneath them. They rank beautifully on page one of Google and remain completely invisible to the AI assistant that just recommended three competitors to a family with a booking budget and no patience for scrolling.

Martinhal Resorts saw this coming. So did we.

Lemongrass Marketing, a B Corp-certified communications agency, delivered an AI-first digital PR strategy for Martinhal Family Hotels & Resorts, a luxury family hotel brand operating in Portugal. The campaign secured #1 rankings across four distinct search surfaces, including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, for high-intent family travel queries.

Client relationship length: 10+ years.

Martinhal is excellent at what it does. It has been renowned for luxury family holidays since its first resort opened in the Algarve in 2010. But "genuinely excellent" and "the first name an algorithm thinks of" are two very different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of good hotels quietly lose bookings.

The family travel category is dominated by household names with marketing budgets Martinhal has no interest in trying to match. Those competitors were already well established for exactly the search queries Martinhal needed – family destinations, family breaks, the phrases parents actually type when they're three tabs deep and ready to book.

The brief was direct: get found for the right keywords, on the platforms that increasingly decide which hotels a family even considers. Not just Google. ChatGPT and Perplexity too.

We stopped treating AI platforms as an extension of Google

This is the mistake we see most often, and it's an expensive one.

Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity have different appetites. They pull from different sources, weight authority differently, and reward different kinds of content. Optimising for one and assuming the others will follow is a bit like writing a press release and being surprised when it doesn't work as a TikTok.

So we audited each platform separately. What was already surfacing for Martinhal's target terms? Which specific sources were being cited when an AI answered a family travel question? Once you know that, the job stops being abstract – you're no longer "doing AI SEO," you're securing coverage in the exact publications that AI platforms treat as ground truth.

We chased citations, not clippings

A press hit that nobody cites is a nice thing to have in a monthly report. A press hit that becomes the source an LLM quotes when 400 parents a month ask about family resorts in Portugal is a genuine commercial asset.

We focused outreach on the round-ups and destination guides that both Google and large language models lean on when answering high-intent, specific questions – the "10 best family holidays" and "best places to go with babies and toddlers" content that sits underneath the AI answer rather than competing with it.

We said the same thing everywhere, on purpose

Journalists reward a fresh angle. AI platforms reward consistency.

That's an awkward tension, and most PR strategies resolve it badly by varying the story so much that no clear brand association ever forms. We went the other way: family destinations and family breaks became the immovable throughline across every pitch, release and piece of content. The more consistently a positioning appears across credible sources, the more confidently an LLM will state it as fact.

Repetition isn't lazy. At scale, it's how machines learn what's true.

Martinhal Resorts now holds the #1 position on Google's AI Overview for "best family resorts in Portugal," #1 on ChatGPT for "best family breaks in Europe," and #1 on Perplexity for "best family hotels."

In global search more broadly, Martinhal ranks #1 for "best places to go with babies and toddlers" – a query that lands squarely on the brand's core audience at the exact moment they're deciding where to spend their money.

For a brand that will never outspend its competitors, owning the AI answer as well as the Google result is a structural advantage. And after ten years as a Lemongrass client, Martinhal is proof that a long PR partnership doesn't have to mean a stale one.

What is AI-first digital PR? AI-first digital PR is a strategy that targets visibility in AI-generated search results - Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar platforms - alongside traditional search rankings. Rather than optimising purely for keyword position, it focuses on earning citations in the sources AI platforms draw from when answering user questions.

Can a smaller hotel brand outrank major competitors in AI search? Yes. Martinhal Resorts achieved #1 rankings across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity while competing against household-name brands with significantly larger marketing budgets. AI platforms weight source credibility and consistency of positioning, not advertising spend.

How long does AI search visibility take to build? It depends on the competitiveness of the category and the brand's existing authority, but AI visibility is built on earned coverage and consistent positioning, meaning it compounds over time rather than switching on instantly.

Lemongrass Marketing is a specialist travel communications agency and certified B Corp. We build digital PR strategies designed to win across Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, because your guests are already asking all three.