"Payments in travel are evolving from a technical necessity into a strategic foundation for guest relationships. Drawing on insights from a WiT Singapore panel with leaders from Ant International, Visa, BigPay, Mandai Wildlife Group, and Agoda, it shows how travel’s complexity has consistently pushed payment innovation forward.

For hoteliers, the key implication is that payments now influence trust, conversion, loyalty, and personalization across the entire guest journey. Rather than ending the transaction, payments increasingly enable relevance, resilience, and long-term value for both guests and operators."

"Europe’s online travel landscape is changing in ways that matter directly to hoteliers. While Booking.com has long dominated demand, recent regulatory pressure and strategic shifts are opening new distribution paths. Expedia Group is not trying to beat Booking.com head-on in consumer traffic; instead, it is expanding through B2B partnerships, technology platforms, and bundled distribution that sits behind the scenes. For hotels, this signals a more fragmented OTA environment, new opportunities for incremental demand, and a renewed need to think strategically about channel mix and pricing control."

AI is reaching a stage where access to advanced assistance could meaningfully shape opportunity and inclusion. To expand access while maintaining affordability, ChatGPT plans to introduce advertising tests for its free and low-cost Go tiers in the U.S., while keeping paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans ad-free. The company positions ads as a way to reduce usage limits and extend capabilities without charging all users. Throughout this shift, ChatGPT emphasizes that trust, privacy, and answer quality remain central.

"Artificial intelligence can write, design, code, and complete tasks at breakneck speed. It can help business leaders draft emails, create agendas, and quickly prepare for important meetings and difficult discussions.

It can do all of that with just a few voice commands—but it still can’t do the hard work of leadership itself. Generative AI cannot set aspirations, make tough calls, build trust among stakeholders, hold team members accountable, or generate truly new ideas.

That work remains deeply human—and more important to get right than ever before, given the scope of change and uncertainty with which today’s organizations are dealing."

Social media remains the leading priority for U.S. digital media professionals entering 2026, with a clear majority ranking it above all other marketing channels. Despite growing interest in influencer marketing and other digital tactics, social platforms continue to command the most attention, resources, and strategic focus. This dominance reflects marketers’ confidence in social media’s reach, measurability, and ability to support multiple objectives across the funnel. As a result, social media is shaping how marketing budgets and campaigns are planned for the year ahead.

"Banks, card issuers, and loyalty platforms are increasingly becoming primary environments where travelers search, book, and redeem hotel stays. What began as card perks and points programs has evolved into full travel marketplaces embedded directly inside financial apps, where trust, daily engagement, and rewards converge. Platforms from institutions such as American Express, Capital One, Chase, Nubank, and Revolut now function as end-to-end travel booking channels. For hotels, this marks a structural shift: visibility and bookability increasingly depend on how well inventory, pricing, and availability flow into these financial and loyalty ecosystems.

Key takeaways

Banks and cards are becoming booking platforms: Travel is now embedded directly inside card and banking apps, turning products like Amex Travel, Chase Travel, Capital One Travel, and NuViagens into high-intent hotel booking environments.
Loyalty is now financial infrastructure: Points and rewards operate like a parallel currency, favoring hotels that integrate cleanly into large-scale bank and card loyalty systems rather than standalone hotel programs."

Payments are no longer a purely administrative concern for hotels; they are becoming a core part of the guest journey and commercial strategy. As traveler expectations evolve, guests increasingly judge hotels by how easy, flexible, and transparent it is to pay before, during, and after a stay. This shift means payment decisions now affect conversion, guest satisfaction, and operational efficiency. For hoteliers, treating payments as a strategic capability rather than a back-office function is becoming a competitive necessity.

"Hotel wholesalers like Hotelbeds, WebBeds, and Expedia Partner Solutions continue to play a role in global travel distribution, but their traditional business model is under increasing pressure as artificial intelligence reshapes how hotels are discovered, priced, and booked. While wholesalers still generate meaningful transaction volumes, their overall share of hotel bookings remains relatively small compared with OTAs and direct channels. AI-driven booking agents, API-based connectivity, and platform consolidation are accelerating structural change across distribution. Long-term survival will depend on wholesalers’ ability to redefine their value beyond legacy intermediation.

Key takeaways

Wholesalers’ limited market share: Hotel wholesalers account for only a small single-digit percentage of global online hotel booking revenue, making their strategic importance smaller than often assumed.
AI-driven disruption: AI-powered booking tools and automated decision-making systems are reducing the need for traditional intermediaries and compressing distribution layers."

In its 2026 What the Future (WTF) Report, KAYAK analyzes billions of user searches alongside survey data from 14,000 Gen Z and Millennial travelers to identify emerging destinations and behaviors. The report highlights a growing preference for less crowded, lower-priced locations and a clear move away from social-media-driven travel choices. Artificial intelligence is positioned as a central force in travel planning, with many travelers trusting AI recommendations more than personal networks. Overall, the findings point to a more personalized, flexible, and experience-focused approach to travel in 2026.

Google is removing reviews from restaurant Google Business Profiles at unprecedented levels, reflecting a broader crackdown on review quality, authenticity, and compliance. Both positive and negative reviews are being deleted, often through automated systems that flag suspicious patterns rather than individual intent. Restaurants, which rely heavily on reviews for discovery and conversion, are particularly exposed to these changes. The trend is altering how trust is built, how local search rankings behave, and how operators must think about review strategy going forward.

Key takeaways

Restaurants hit disproportionately hard: Food and beverage businesses experience higher-than-average review deletions due to high review volume and frequent abuse patterns.
AI-driven moderation: Automated systems increasingly remove reviews that appear incentivized, repetitive, or coordinated, even when customers are real.

The hospitality industry enters 2026 with a growing consensus that fragmented technology is no longer sustainable. A conversation between Shiji and Amadeus highlights a shift away from tactical integrations toward genuinely integrated platform thinking. The focus is moving from systems that merely exchange data to environments that operate as a single, coherent whole. This evolution reflects rising operational complexity, higher guest expectations, and the need for technology that supports, rather than burdens, hotel teams.

Key takeaways

From integration to coherence: Simple system connectivity is no longer sufficient; hotels need platforms that align data, workflows, and decision-making into one operational logic.
Partnerships mature under pressure: Strategic alliances, shaped during the pandemic, now prioritize reliability, scale, and clarity over short-term feature expansion.

In addition to traditional SEO efforts, the increased use of AI for travel planning requires hotels to implement new strategies like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to ensure their property appears in the AI summaries and snippets potential guests are using to make their booking decisions.

"Travel companies are increasingly investing in artificial intelligence, but the focus is now moving from early experimentation to clear accountability. As AI becomes embedded across customer-facing and operational functions, brands are under pressure to demonstrate tangible returns on investment. The article outlines how major travel players are measuring AI ROI differently depending on use case, maturity, and strategic priority. It concludes that success will depend less on technical sophistication and more on disciplined measurement and alignment with business outcomes.

Key takeaways

AI ROI is use-case dependent: Travel brands measure returns differently across applications, with transactional use cases like customer service and revenue management being easier to quantify than exploratory or experience-driven innovations.
Financial and productivity metrics dominate: Companies prioritize direct financial impact, such as revenue uplift or cost reduction, alongside gains in productivity and efficiency enabled by automation."

"Generative AI is changing where and how travel decisions are formed, with travelers increasingly shaping preferences inside conversational AI tools rather than through traditional search results. This shift reduces the influence of classic search-based visibility and alters the role online travel agencies and hotel websites play in early discovery. As intent forms earlier and elsewhere, control over the guest journey becomes more fragmented. For hoteliers, this evolution raises strategic questions about visibility, differentiation, and how guests encounter their brand for the first time.

Key takeaways

Guest discovery is moving upstream: Travelers are increasingly forming preferences inside AI tools before visiting OTA or hotel websites, reducing the role of classic search-based visibility.
OTAs may influence decisions later: As planning happens elsewhere, platforms like Expedia and Booking.com risk losing their ability to shape guest choices early, even if they still process bookings.
Marketing costs may rebalance: Heavy OTA spending on search advertising becomes less effective as AI keeps users within conversational interfaces for longer."

Travel AI is approaching a point where improvements in language models alone deliver diminishing returns for travelers. The real constraint now lies in how AI presents information, not how well it generates text. Travel planning is emotional, visual, and non-linear, yet most AI tools rely on linear chat interfaces that struggle to support comparison and decision-making. As a result, the next wave of innovation in travel AI will be defined by interfaces that better reflect how people actually plan and experience travel.