eTourism Trends and News

From AI-driven revenue management to more efficient operating models, we’re seeing tools that allow us to rethink how our hotels are run. Systems are getting smarter. Data is becoming more actionable. Processes that once required multiple people can now be streamlined or automated.

But technology alone isn’t the answer.

In fact, the more advanced the tools become, the more important the real question becomes: How does technology help us become a better operator?

Les outils d’intelligence artificielle (IA) s’immiscent de plus en plus dans les habitudes de vie quotidienne, et la préparation des vacances n’y fait pas exception. En effet, le quart (25 %) des voyageurs québécois mentionnent avoir eu recours à l’IA pour planifier un voyage en 2025, soit une augmentation de 15 points en un an.

L’enquête réalisée par le Cercle de la Chaire de tourisme Transat de l’ESG UQAM, auprès de 3055 voyageurs québécois en novembre 2025, révèle plusieurs données stratégiques pour l’industrie touristique. Les traits distinctifs des clientèles utilisatrices des outils d’IA en contexte de voyage ainsi que les différents usages figurent parmi les signaux à surveiller.

When TikTok launched GO on May 12, the partner list was instructive: Booking.com, Expedia, Trip.com, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets. Six companies that have spent years building machine-readable inventory pipelines. Airbnb was not among them—a deliberate absence that has generated considerable commentary about platform strategy.

That conversation is worth having. But it is obscuring a more uncomfortable one. The hotels debating whether TikTok GO matters to their distribution strategy should first ask: Is their inventory structured in a way that any of these systems can actually read?

For a significant portion of the industry, the answer is no. And the implications of that gap are arriving faster than most properties are prepared for.

Gemini 3.5 Live Translate brings near real-time, natural speech translation to Google AI Studio, Google Translate and Google Meet.

The hotel distribution ecosystem is evolving to support a “bookable everywhere” paradigm, as discovery and transactions expand to new interfaces and platforms.

Analysis from hospitality technology company Shiji shows how AI discovery and booking, map-based commerce and social messaging are changing hotel distribution. Shiji’s Hotel Distribution Technology Chart maps the companies, distribution channels and trends defining the sector in 2026.

According to Shiji, the chart, now in its eleventh year, is created with input from global hospitality professionals and experts and provides an updated view of the hotel distribution landscape.

The 2026 chart adds several categories, which together “reflect how hotel distribution is evolving into a broader visibility strategy shaped by AI, structured data and interoperability,” the company said. 

Most hoteliers know they should be responding to guest reviews. Fewer realize that the way responses are distributed across Booking.com, Expedia, Google, and TripAdvisor is quietly shaping how future guests perceive the property—often more than the reviews themselves.

After looking closely at how independent and small-portfolio hotels manage their review workflows, a consistent pattern emerges: response activity is uneven, inconsistent in tone, and frequently abandoned on the platforms that matter most for direct bookings. The operational cost is small. The reputational cost compounds.

What inconsistent response coverage actually looks like
Walk through a typical small portfolio and you’ll often find something like this: Google reviews get answered within a day because the GM has the app on their phone. Booking.com replies happen in bursts, usually when the extranet notification pile gets too tall to ignore. Expedia is hit-or-miss. TripAdvisor gets the most attention when there’s a one-star review to defend against, and nothing for weeks otherwise.

Die Tourismusbranche steht vor einem grundlegenden Wandel. Während Digitalisierung lange vor allem mit Buchungsplattformen, Websites oder Social Media verbunden wurde, beginnt nun eine neue Phase: Daten, künstliche Intelligenz und digitale Infrastrukturen werden zunehmend zu strategischen Faktoren für Wettbewerbsfähigkeit, Resilienz und Produktivität. Genau diese Entwicklung stand im Zentrum der internationalen Resilient Tourism Conference 2026 in Siders (Wallis). Die dort präsentierten Forschungsarbeiten und Praxisbeispiele zeigen: Der Tourismus der Zukunft wird datengetriebener, vernetzter und technologischer – gleichzeitig aber auch komplexer.

""Travel is the only major industry getting hit from both directions at once: AI search volumes are exploding without converting while total AI token bills internally are rising.

The travel industry is being squeezed by AI from both sides of the P&L simultaneously, and it may be the only major industry where that is true.

Adriana Lee did a deep dive on Skift two days before our Skift Data and AI Summit showing that the look-to-book ratio, the foundational math of travel distribution, is deteriorating as AI agents search without the human limits that kept the ratio manageable for decades. People eventually stop browsing, which is the constraint the entire economics of travel search was built around, but agents don't stop. Every search costs the airline or hotel money whether or not it converts, and the searches are multiplying by orders of magnitude. That is the demand side.""

Rebuilding legacy technology to optimize for artificial intelligence (AI) is a massive undertaking. For travel giants, the journey is yielding lessons in architecture, speed and corporate culture. 

Executives from Hilton, Air Canada, Marriott and Evolve pulled back the curtain on what it takes to confront legacy tech. 

Most travel companies know where they want to go with AI. The harder question is why so few are actually getting there, and whether this year’s infrastructure decisions are the ones that determine the answer.

That’s what Skift Studio set out to understand. In conversations with ten senior technology, product, and digital leaders across airlines, hospitality companies, travel platforms, and technology providers, we didn’t just ask about AI vision. We asked what’s actually in the way.

Every leader said a version of the same thing: the bottleneck isn’t AI. It’s everything underneath it. And for technology leaders with modernization decisions on the table right now, the window for shaping that foundation — rather than inheriting whatever standard emerges — is closing.

Lors des Assises du tourisme qui réunissaient plus de 600 participantes et participants au Palais des congrès, le 12 mai dernier, la ministre du Tourisme, Amélie Dionne, a annoncé un appui financier de 400 000 dollars sur trois ans pour la création de l’Observatoire de l’IA, des données et du tourisme, dont le titulaire est le professeur du Département de marketing Paul Arseneault.

«Cet observatoire a pour mission de doter le Québec d’une infrastructure centralisée de données et d’analytique au service de l’ensemble de l’écosystème touristique, souligne son titulaire. Il s’agit, plus spécifiquement, de réunir, standardiser et rendre interopérables des données aujourd’hui éparses provenant de dizaines de bases de données, afin d’offrir une vision intégrée.»

Amadeus will publicly introduce two hotel AI tools at HITEC, but its bigger play is infrastructure. As AI agents move closer to travel booking, the GDS wants to help define how hotels are found, priced, changed, and paid for.

AI is becoming an important filter between travelers and travel brands. According to Skift Research, 63% of travelers say they have used generative tools for trip planning. Instead of sorting through pages of search results, travelers can ask an AI assistant for hotel recommendations and receive only a handful of options. For hotels that aren’t surfaced, that can mean never entering the traveler’s consideration set.

For brand and commercial leaders running multi-property portfolios, the question is becoming more urgent: Is your brand legible to the systems that increasingly determine which hotels get surfaced at all?

Yet AI-powered discovery is only one part of a broader transformation underway in hospitality. As AI reshapes how travelers search, book, and engage, hotel leaders are rethinking everything from distribution and loyalty to operations and customer experience.

For Accor, that means positioning the business for a future where AI plays a central role.

The Industrial Revolution increased output: Henry Ford’s five-day workweek helped turn higher productivity into more leisure time, while rising wages and paid time off did the rest. Over generations, productivity gains became hotel stays, flights, restaurant meals, attraction visits, cruises and vacation rental trips.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next productivity shock, and for travel, the question is not just how much output it creates but where the gains go. Said another way, if AI increases productivity, it will make the economy bigger; the question is whether that growth turns into jobs, disposable income and time.

As an economist, when I forecast travel demand, I usually come back to two variables: jobs and income. If people have jobs and their disposable income is growing, they travel. If either side of that equation weakens, travel feels it quickly.

That is why the AI debate matters so much: If AI raises productivity and those gains show up in employment, disposable income and flexibility, travel could be one of the biggest beneficiaries. If AI increases output while the number of employed people declines, the industry faces a very different demand environment.

Last week was a watershed moment for the entertainment sector, with the revelation that YouTube has overtaken Netflix in average daily viewing among users around the world.

Of course, anyone working in the travel industry is used to hearing about the growing influence of video platforms like YouTube on the booking journey, but the news, published in Digital i’s latest trends report and heralded as “one of the defining media shifts of the decade” is a stark reminder of just how fast consumer habits are evolving.

YouTube’s jump to the number one spot comes after an almost 10% increase in daily viewing time, rising to 99.1 minutes in 2025 from 87.2 minutes the previous year. Hotels in particular are struggling with the pace of change, according to a digital expert at Radisson Hotel Group.

Speaking a few days earlier at an event, Velit Dundar, Radisson’s vice president of global e-commerce, talked about a “speed problem,” voicing concerns that the technology systems hotels operate cannot keep up with changing consumer habits.

Travellers planning a trip to New Zealand can now explore the country with help from a new AI trip planner powered by GuideGeek technology. This tool not only answers travel questions in real time but also connects directly to Tourism New Zealand’s fully playable Minecraft destination. Visitors can discover the beauty of New Zealand’s landscapes,

Hoteliers are grappling with infrastructure and data fragmentation as companies revamp their tech stacks for the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Stakeholders are taking different approaches to AI investment, with some opting for targeted AI deployments and others pursuing broader modernization efforts.

“Both approaches exist in the market right now,” said Tan Bee Leng, chief commercial officer for The Ascott Limited. “Some players are rebuilding from scratch, others are layering on top of what they have.”

How hotels are modernizing the tech stack
Eighty-two percent of hotels planned to increase AI usage in the next 12 months according to March 2026 research from Canary Technologies. With varying legacy architectures in place and no blueprint for AI evolution, hoteliers’ execution philosophies vary significantly by brand footprint and business model.

A look into how artificial intelligence is transforming hospitality operations and guest experiences. An exclusive sector report in collaboration with 1,000 businesses and 8,000 consumers across six international markets.  

Key insights:  

Businesses waste 286 hours per year (roughly 36 working days) switching between disconnected systems

13% of operational costs lost due to unconnected systems 

57% of consumers say technology has significantly improved their hospitality experience 

Do years of experience in performance marketing on Google naturally translate to artificial intelligence (AI) platforms? Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel seems to think so.

During the online travel agency’s (OTA) first-quarter earnings, Fogel was “incredibly excited” about the thought of AI players moving towards a similar model, citing Booking’s experience earned over the years with Google.

Time will tell—the dynamics of current performance marketing such as keyword auctions aren’t a feature of the AI models but having volumes of structured data is definitely a plus.

While those shifts play out, Booking Holdings continues, alongside its online travel counterparts, to vie for consumers by increasing marketing spend year over year. In Q1 2026, the online giant invested $2.1 billion in marketing, up 16% year over year and representing about 38% of revenue.