Hotels must prepare for a marketing funnel that no longer ends at the booking, as consumers constantly look for inspiration, with high numbers now re-shopping after completing a transaction.

Most travelers enjoy researching and planning, according to a new report, and hotels are being urged to better engage with their guests during the post-booking window.   

Invest in long-term foundations for scalable AI success
AI leaders often face challenges when managing and prioritizing the many activities required for a successful AI implementation. A flexible roadmap template helps organizations plan and sequence tasks to deliver AI at scale. Gartner Vice President Analyst Leinar Ramos stresses the importance of preparation and says, “AI is 30% technology and 70% something else. AI leaders who invest in long-term foundations — such as strategy, value management, organization, talent, governance, engineering and data — and not just tools will be the ones who drive business value at scale.”

Wer in diesen Tagen die Partner-Mails von Booking.com öffnet, reibt sich verwundert die Augen. „Important updates on pricing freedom, ranking and our programmes" lautet der Betreff, und was dann folgt, klingt über weite Strecken wie eine Zusammenfassung dessen, was der Hotelverband Deutschland (IHA) und seine europäischen Partnerverbände dem Portal seit Jahren ins Stammbuch schreiben. Flankiert wird das Ganze von einem Factsheet der Europäischen Kommission und einem eigenen Blogbeitrag des Portals unter der schönen Überschrift „Building trust through transparency".

The rise of AI agents is creating a new agentic distribution ecosystem that will coexist alongside the web. Just as hotels have spent decades building their online presence and direct channel for human use, they must now also prepare them to be used by AI agents. This transformation by no means implies the demise of the website, though it does pose significant challenges for the web ecosystem as we know it today.

The fundamental difference lies in who interacts with the technology. In the web ecosystem, the user searches, compares, browses, and personally performs the actions. In the agentic ecosystem, that same user will be able to progressively delegate these tasks to an assistant acting on their behalf.

This carries major technological implications. For decades we have built interfaces for humans: websites and booking engines that allow a person to discover a hotel, check availability, compare rooms and rates, and complete a booking.

Expedia is enabling travelers to book hotels through Muse, the personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistant unveiled by Meta earlier this month.

Travelers in the U.S. will be able to describe what they’re looking for, including dates, destination and hotel preferences, be presented with options that fit their needs and make a booking.

Expedia remains the merchant of record for the bookings and payment is completed through Muse. No specific date has been given for when Expedia in Muse will be available.

The company is already working with Meta to test in-feed conversational ads on the platform. The initiative, revealed at its Explore event in May, enables travelers to start planning a trip or ask questions.

Expedia is also part of Google’s agentic booking launch alongside other partners, including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Booking.com and Marriott International.

The AI Hospitality Alliance + HEDNA AI Use Case Knowledge Base offers a useful snapshot of how AI is actually being applied across the hospitality technology stack. From 198 submitted examples, the initiative identified 109 unique use cases across 39 hotel systems, grouped into five core hotel functions—Guest Experience, Revenue & BI, Operations, Distribution & Commerce, and Marketing & Sales—plus three cross-cutting infrastructure layers. The densest areas today are operations and commercial decision-making, with common applications including labour scheduling, pricing optimisation, guest messaging, segmentation, and AI-supported hotel discovery.

What stands out is that AI is increasingly framed not as a standalone tool, but as a connective layer across fragmented hotel systems—linking data, interpreting context and orchestrating workflows. The main expected benefits are efficiency and time savings, better guest service, stronger conversion and revenue performance, and improved decision support. At the same time, the knowledge base highlights a clear gap: governance, privacy, explainability and human oversight remain relatively underdeveloped compared with the enthusiasm around automation and agentic systems. For hoteliers, this makes the resource especially valuable as a practical map of where AI is gaining traction—and where more strategic thinking is still needed.

Google hat mit dem «Universal Commerce Protocol» (UCP) einen offenen Standard vorgestellt, der jetzt gezielt auf die Hotellerie ausgeweitet wird. Das Ziel: Nutzer sollen künftig direkt aus einer KI-Unterhaltung heraus ein Zimmer buchen können – ohne Umweg über eine Website oder ein Buchungsportal. Für Hotels, die sich bisher auf «Sichtbarkeit in der Google-Suche» konzentriert haben, entsteht damit eine neue, technisch anspruchsvollere Ebene: die Sichtbarkeit als buchbare Einheit innerhalb eines KI-Gesprächs. Wer das Prinzip früh versteht, kann sich rechtzeitig positionieren, statt später unter Zeitdruck nachzuziehen.

"A market that looks open, and mostly isn't.

A hotel's PMS increasingly functions as the operational core of a wider technology ecosystem — connected to revenue management, CRM, marketing, guest engagement, BI, point of sale, payments, and a fast-growing set of AI applications. Whether that ecosystem can be built at all depends on one prerequisite: whether the PMS exposes a public, documented API.

HotelLogic and the AI Hospitality Alliance examined the entire discoverable hotel PMS market to find out how many do. Of 343 vendors audited, only 24 (7%) publish fully self-serve API documentation. The remaining 93% are gated or undocumented by default."

Kayak co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English are developing Lola, a Booking Holdings-backed AI assistant for travel, dining, events and other experiences. It will offer a free tier alongside $5 and $25 monthly memberships. Lola aims to learn members’ preferences, access live offers through partner APIs and turn recommendations into reservations within the chat. Hafner says its search results will have no advertising or paid placement.

The shift for tourism is the tighter link between discovery, recommendation and booking. With inventory from Booking Holdings brands and partners such as GetYourGuide, an assistant like Lola could influence which hotels and experiences travellers consider before they visit a provider’s website. For destinations and independent businesses, the question is how to make their offers visible and bookable in these systems. Whether a membership model can deliver recommendations that users perceive as independent remains to be seen.

This year’s World Tourism Day theme, "Digital Agenda and AI to Redesign Tourism," prompts the industry to reflect on how new technology can improve customer experience, efficiency and operations. 

AI-driven technology is increasingly embedded in tourism and hospitality workplaces, from agents used for customer service to shift-scheduling software. 

But as the industry races to adopt AI, are workers being given a say in how these tools change their jobs? And what’s the cost of them not being heard?

Our research at Futourwork, an EU-funded project examining worker voice and well-being at this time of digital transformation, aims to understand this gap and a way forward that benefits workers and businesses alike

Die KI «All Concierge» unterstützt Gäste bei der Hotelsuche und Buchungs­ver­wal­tung sowie während und nach dem Aufenthalt. Parallel stellt die Hotelgruppe ihren Teams mit «The Butler» eine interne KI-Anwendung zur Verfügung.

AI Agents May Reshape Travel Distribution Rather Than Eliminate OTAs

The article argues that the rise of autonomous AI agents such as Meta’s Muse could fundamentally shift the entry point of travel distribution from search engines and OTA interfaces to conversational agents. The core disruption is not necessarily that OTAs disappear, but that they may lose control of the customer interface and part of the margin associated with search friction. Agents can compare prices, interpret complex offers, and potentially route travelers directly to hotel booking engines, reducing the value of traditional metasearch and some OTA functions. Yet the article stresses that OTAs still possess major structural advantages: huge inventories, contractual relationships with fragmented hotel supply, payment infrastructure, customer service, fraud management, and loyalty programs. For now, AI-driven bookings remain marginal, and agents often still rely on Booking or Expedia to complete transactions. (Platform Aeronaut)

The more plausible medium-term scenario is therefore a redistribution of roles and margins across the distribution ecosystem. AI agents could become the new demand-side gatekeepers, replacing part of Google’s role, while OTAs increasingly operate as infrastructure providers supplying inventory, pricing, payments, and fulfilment. Expedia’s B2B and API strategy illustrates this possible evolution toward becoming the “rails” behind AI-mediated commerce. The most consequential scenario for hotels would arise if agents connect directly to hotel CRS/PMS and booking engines: this could shift bookings away from OTAs and reduce commissions, but only if hotels and their technology providers can expose reliable real-time rates, availability, payments, and service capabilities. The article therefore frames agentic AI less as immediate OTA disintermediation than as a distribution shock in which control of the customer interface—and potentially the economic rent attached to it—moves to a new generation of AI intermediaries. (Platform Aeronaut)

Booking a trip has never been easier. And it has never taken more work. It has also never been more complex. What could previously be described as a linear funnel now behaves more like a series of orbits, with travelers moving back and forth between multiple options.

Inspiration now arrives before intent, delivered continuously through social feeds, streaming, articles & reviews, and AI. Research is spread across more tools than any one of them can reconcile. And AI has become something travelers will readily consult but not yet trust to transact. Rather than narrowing steadily toward a decision, travelers orbit several possible trips at once, move inward toward a booking, fall back to earlier stages, and reopen choices that looked settled.

Travelers now move through roughly 65 touchpoints before a trip is booked, up from 45 in 2018 — and the booking confirmation is not the end of the story. Seventy-eight percent of travelers keep researching after they book, and half have changed a confirmed accommodation after seeing a better option online.

Much of the travel discussion in 2026 appears to arrive at the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) agents will play a growing role in how people research and book trips.

That conclusion is supported by the evidence, but it captures only part of the change underway. Phocuswright’s 2026 research found that 44% of travelers would book directly within an AI platform, while 40% would allow an AI assistant to handle flight and hotel bookings on their behalf.

The immediate response has been a race to build assistants, trip planners and conversational booking products. By 2030, however, these features are likely to be widely available, limiting the differentiation that access to an AI model can provide.

A more consequential question is whether the systems beneath those interfaces can support what the agent has been asked to do.

"Uber has frequency and Airbnb has travel intent; their expansion into hotels will show which advantage travels further.

Dara Khosrowshahi has spent much of his career expanding platforms beyond their original center of gravity. When he took over Expedia in 2005, it was already a broad online travel business spanning hotels, flights, cars, and packages. Over the next decade, he helped push that model further across more products, markets, and brands, reinforcing the basic OTA logic: capture more of the trip inside one platform. A flight booking could lead to a hotel booking, which could lead to a car rental, with each category adding demand and revenue without necessarily replacing the others.

At Uber, Khosrowshahi has been running a version of the same playbook, except the starting point is a high-frequency consumer habit rather than an occasional trip. Rides led to Eats, grocery, and other services, and now Uber is pushing further into travel with hotels. What ties those products together is not really the physical infrastructure — hotels obviously do not use drivers — but the customers..."

Die Europäische Union (EU) will mit dem Digital Markets Act die Macht grosser Internetplattformen begrenzen und für faireren Wettbewerb sorgen. Nun muss Google seine Suche in Europa erneut umbauen. Ausgerechnet in der Hotelsuche könnte das aber eine Nebenwirkung haben, die dem politischen Ziel zu widersprechen scheint: Online-Vermittler wie Booking.com und Expedia erhalten mehr Sichtbarkeit, während einzelne Hotels in der Suche weniger prominent und mit weniger Buchungsinformationen erscheinen. Google warnt deshalb vor einem Schaden für lokale Unternehmen und den Direktvertrieb. Hotel Inside wollte wissen: Ist das nur Lobbying eines Konzerns, der seine privilegierte Stellung verteidigen will – oder trifft Google einen wunden Punkt der EU-Regulierung? Die Antwort lautet: beides. Die Gefahr für Hotels ist real. Aber die Geschichte ist komplizierter, als Google sie erzählt.