Travel in the United Kingdom, France and Germany continues to rise. Booking decisions are often influenced by factors revolving around value and price, while media use has increased when planning and searching for trip ideas. When it comes to research before booking a trip, new Phocuswright research report Europe Consumer Travel Report 2025 has uncovered four key insights that travel companies should know about:
Search engines and online travel agency sites maintain their lead positions as main research resources. The reviews found on general search engines are leveraged the most. Interestingly, artificial intelligence (AI) results in search are at parity with paid search results, likely due to their placement at the top of the page. Generative AI is gaining momentum but still has a long way to go before being a top resource. Recommendations from friends and family are still used more than any other single resource.
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.
Major hotel group CEOs were all reading from the same script during their first-quarter earnings calls in recent weeks. Most described their use of artificial intelligence as a “competitive advantage,” but just how valid are these statements when everyone else is using AI?
Across the board, hotel groups called out technology investments, ancillary sales or better customer service.
Date-and-Location to Intent-Driven Discovery For most of the online travel era, hotel search has been dominated by structured inputs: destination, travel dates, number of guests, and a set of filters layered on top. That model gave travelers broad access to supply in a standardized format across platforms, but it also forced them to translate what they wanted into the language of the search interface. A traveler who wanted a hotel that felt special but not formal, or something easy after a late arrival with children, had to approximate those needs through crude proxies such as price bands, star ratings, neighborhoods, or amenity filters.
AI changes that structure by allowing travelers to search through expressed intent rather than only through dates, location, and predefined filters. The user can describe the trip in natural language, provide context, and refine the request through conversation. Search becomes more semantic, more contextual, and more personalized. This gives the system greater discretion in deciding which hotels count as credible matches in the first place.
In that sense, AI does not simply improve the search interface; it changes the unit of competition from presence in a large database to relevance within an interpreted request. It is not sufficient for hotels to be included in a broad inventory. They are increasingly competing to be judged meaningfully relevant to the traveler’s expressed and implicit intent.
In Brief: Cloudbeds has launched Ask Signals, an AI-powered interface that utilizes consolidated hotel data to facilitate conversational interactions, aiming to improve service delivery and streamline operations.
Acquisition strengthens AI discoverability analytics, allowing hotels to track and optimize performance across AI-powered travel platforms including ChatGPT and Gemini.
Lighthouse, the AI Commercial Operating Platform for the travel and hospitality industry, today announced the acquisition of Hotelrank.ai, the leading AI visibility and optimization platform for hotels. The acquisition adds a measurement layer into Lighthouse's Connect AI solution, giving hotels the ability to manage their appearance, ranking, and performance across AI travel platforms including ChatGPT and Gemini.
"Ten years after Hilton, Marriott, and other chains began coaxing travelers to book directly, online travel agencies still control roughly the same slice of the pie. Yet the chains have won the economics: lower commissions, better contract terms, and stronger loyalty programs.
Mark Vondrasek, Hyatt's chief commercial officer, had half his stock-based award riding on one number: the share of bookings flowing through Hyatt's own site and app. Between 2023 and 2025, he missed the target. He didn't get that part of the payout. The incentive captured how much a decade of fighting online travel agencies still consumes the major hotel groups.
It’s been 10 years since Hilton launched the "Stop Clicking Around" ad campaign. It spent nearly $100 million, and ads appeared in 18 countries. Staff wrapped elevators and key cards with a message for guests: book directly.
Each OTA booking carries a commission, dollars that come straight off operating margins. Guests who book directly with hotels are cheaper to acquire, hand over the data that fuels personalization, and tend to spend more over their lifetimes."
Any organisation running AI in any serious way is doing so across three groups with different relationships to the work.
The board oversees and carries fiduciary accountability. Its instinct runs toward caution, because the exposure of getting it wrong is high and the cost of moving slightly later is usually tolerable from where the board sits.
The company runs the operating model. Its instinct runs toward movement, because the cost of not adapting is felt in margin, capability and competitive position, week by week. This is also where AI lands in people's actual work, reshaping roles, judgement and how teams are structured, long before any of that reaches a register. Standing still has a price the board does not pay directly.
External entities enforce compliance (regulators, auditors, standards bodies, large customers) against frames that are themselves shifting. Their instinct runs toward demonstrability. They care less about whether the organisation is moving at the right pace than whether it can evidence what it has done.
Google verändert nicht einfach nur die Suche. Der Konzern baut gerade die Infrastruktur für die vollständige Kontrolle über digitale Reiseentscheidungen. Hotels, Destinationen und Reiseanbieter stehen vor einer tektonischen Machtverschiebung.
Spain’s hospitality sector is getting its first real-world taste of Europe’s digital identity future. The industry response so far is a mix of optimism and operational caution, with a few growing pains.
Since April 2, hotels and other businesses in Spain are legally required to accept the country’s new MiDNI mobile identity app as a valid form of identification. It is part of the a broader move toward digital identity under Europe’s evolvingElectronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) 2.0 framework.
The rollout effectively makes Spain one of the first major live test cases for how digital identity could work in day-to-day hospitality operations. It comes ahead of the wider European Union Digital Identity Wallet rollout planned across the European Union by the end of 2026.
For Spain’s hoteliers, the transition to digital identity is reshaping guest registration, check-in operations and compliance, though adoption remains uneven and some are still proceeding cautiously.
A new study from the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research based on 1,029 U.S. travelers shows that AI usage in travel planning varies significantly across spending segments.
One particularly interesting insight: - travelers are comfortable using AI for discovery tasks (activities, attractions, factual information), - but much more hesitant when it comes to complex, subjective or high-stakes decisions.
The study identifies very different AI expectations depending on traveler profiles:
Budget travelers use AI mainly to identify value and compare prices,
Premium travelers see AI as a discovery and optimization tool,
Aspirational travelers look for curated and personalized recommendations,
Luxury travelers still value human advisors for final decision-making.
Another key takeaway: - more than 60% of respondents cite accuracy concerns as the main barrier to broader AI adoption in travel planning. Transparency and overly generic recommendations are also major issues.
For hospitality and destinations, this is important: - the future of AI in tourism may not be about replacing human interaction, but about designing hybrid systems adapted to - different traveler expectations, trust levels and spending behaviors.
The era of the “one AI assistant for everyone” may already be over.
With its 2026 Summer Release, Airbnb is moving far beyond accommodation and positioning itself as an integrated travel platform.
New services now include: - car rentals - grocery delivery - airport pickups - luggage storage - FIFA World Cup 2026 experiences - boutique and independent hotels
This strategy strongly resembles the evolution of platforms like Uber: expanding from a single service into a broader ecosystem designed to capture more moments of the traveler journey.
For hospitality, this matters for several reasons.
Airbnb is no longer only competing with hotels or vacation rentals — it is increasingly competing for the entire travel relationship. The platform aims to become the central interface where travelers discover, plan, book and manage experiences in one seamless environment.
At the same time, the integration of thousands of boutique and independent hotels shows how platform boundaries between “hotels” and “alternative accommodation” continue to blur.
The key strategic question for the industry becomes: How can hotels and destinations remain visible, differentiated and connected to guests in an increasingly platform-centric and AI-driven travel ecosystem?
Google’s latest announcements at Google I/O ’26 may represent a major turning point for hotel distribution and digital commerce.
With the expansion of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) into lodging, Google is laying the foundations for a future where AI agents can not only search for hotels, but also compare offers, apply loyalty benefits, complete bookings and manage transactions directly within AI environments such as Gemini or AI Mode.
The most strategic element behind this evolution is probably the development of agentic payment protocols (AP2), allowing AI assistants to securely transact on behalf of users within predefined guardrails (budget, preferred brands, policies, etc.), while hotels remain Merchant of Record and retain ownership of customer relationships and data.
For hospitality, this raises several fundamental questions:
🔹 What happens to traditional search and booking funnels when AI agents become the interface? 🔹 How should hotels structure and expose their data so AI systems can understand availability, policies and product attributes?
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.
This is the question that more and more hotels are asking themselves. And it’s logical that they would. The truth is, the answer does not fit into a quick formula: there are several layers of visibility in AI assistants, and they do not all work the same way.
For years, digital visibility was complex, but it had a recognizable framework: Google published SEO guides, advertising worked with bidding rules, and metasearch engines operated with their own connection and competition rules. Complex, but known. With AI assistants, the landscape is shifting again. And the temptation is to treat them like a new Google with a new set of rules to decode.
It does not work that way.
A hotel can appear in an answer through three different layers. Each one has different rules, tools, and levels of control for the hotel, and its weight changes depending on the phase of the funnel.
Before moving on, a quick clarification: we are talking about organic positioning. The emerging paid layer within assistants, with ChatGPT testing Ads in beta and Google advancing in AI Mode with formats like direct offers, is another dynamic.
"For years, hospitality has obsessed over the same question: How will artificial intelligence (AI) platforms handle hotel bookings?
Will ChatGPT favor online travel agencies (OTAs)? Will hotel brands maintain visibility? Will direct booking survive when travel decisions increasingly happen through AI assistants rather than websites?
This week, OpenAI may have quietly offered us the first real clue. The company announced new personal finance capabilities inside ChatGPT, powered through a connection to Plaid, the infrastructure platform linking more than 12,000 financial institutions into a single trusted ecosystem."
Anderson's earlier research famously showed that OTA presence (Expedia, Booking) lifted non-OTA bookings by up to 26% — the "billboard effect." Visibility on a third-party shelf generated demand elsewhere. AI breaks that mechanism. It is not a shelf at all. It is "a system that can interpret the intentions of the traveler, infer the trip, shape the choice set, and influence where the booking happens."
Four shifts From common visibility to individual interpretation. A request for "a nice hotel in Chicago" no longer returns the same list to everyone. AI distinguishes walkability-for-restaurants from family-space-with-flexible-cancellation without explicit filters. From dates-and-location to intent. Natural language replaces the structured search form. The competitive unit moves from "presence in a large database" to "relevance within an interpreted request." From broad marketplace to curated set. AI surfaces 10–20 recommendations, not the full inventory. Exclusion from the recommended set is more consequential than a poor ranking on an OTA results page. From visibility to representation. Success depends on how the AI understands and describes the property, not just whether it appears.
"Mews and SiteMinder are bringing distribution and hotel operations into one platform. The goal: Break down the hotel data silos that complicate AI adoption in the agentic age.
Hotels can't put AI agents to work if their data is trapped across separate systems. Mews and SiteMinder are trying to fix that — starting with their own platforms.
The two companies are expected to announce a native, direct integration Wednesday at Mews Unfold in Amsterdam, which embeds SiteMinder's distribution engine directly inside Mews's hotel operating system.
In exclusive interviews with Skift, executives framed the partnership as groundwork hotels need before artificial intelligence agents can manage distribution on their behalf.
Fragmented hotel data remains the top barrier to AI adoption in hospitality, with rates, distribution, and performance spread across separate systems. A September 2025 SiteMinder survey of 700 hoteliers found that 65% believe faster, fully integrated systems could yield at least 6% more annual revenue."
The hospitality industry is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI), yet hotels differ in, how they perceive its impact. This study examines whether these perceptions are, shaped more by structural resources or by managerial cognition. Survey data from 747, hotel managers across five European countries are used to analyze the effects of hotel, size, staff size, business evaluation scope, and cognitive flexibility. Business evaluation, scope reflects the breadth of performance indicators monitored, while cognitive, flexibility captures managers adaptive thinking. Results show that staff size, business, evaluation scope, and cognitive flexibility are positively associated with perceived AI, impact, whereas hotel size measured by number of rooms is not. The findings suggest, that managerial cognition plays a more important role than physical scale in shaping AI, awareness. This study advances hospitality digital transformation research by, highlighting cognitive readiness as a key driver of AI adoption.
As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes travel discovery and booking, the industry is learning to market to a new audience: AI agents.
Business-to-agent (B2A) marketing is becoming essential as companies adapt to a landscape undergoing tectonic shifts.
With Phocuswright research showing that travelers are increasingly willing to book with AI, marketers need to confront a changing trajectory—and determine how to show up in an AI-driven world.
“If we want to give great travelers wonderful experiences, then we need to make sure that these tools are guiding travelers to the right options,” Clayton Nelson, VP of enterprise alliances and AI for Expedia Group, said while moderating a panel titled “AI in Marketing: From Social Spark to Agentic Decision” at Expedia Group’s partner conference Explore.
“Do agents make the same decisions as humans? Do they care about price in the same way? Amenities in the same way? Do agents care about loyalty? Do agents care about the brands—things that we have invested decades in?”
Google hat auf seiner Entwicklerkonferenz Google I/O 2026 den weiteren Ausbau KI-gestützter Such- und Buchungsfunktionen angekündigt. Nach Angaben des Unternehmens sollen neue agentenbasierte Funktionen künftig direkt in die Suche integriert werden. Technologische Grundlage ist unter anderem das Modell Gemini 3.5 Flash, das laut Google künftig als Standardmodell im sogenannten „AI Mode“ eingesetzt wird. Marketing- und Digitalexperte Sven Häberlin (Tourismus-Consult) kennt die Hintergründe – und gibt Tipps.
La nouvelle étude de distribution d’HotellerieSuisse et de la HES-SO Valais-Wallis montre que la distribution hôtelière numérique en Suisse continue d’évoluer de manière dynamique, tout en restant fortement dépendante des plateformes de réservation en ligne (OTAs).
"Brand recognition, a cognitive shortcut for human buying decisions, means nothing to AI agents that can reason through every option every time. That's shifting travel's entire marketing apparatus.
Expedia Group is building a dedicated marketing function aimed not at travelers or business clients, but at AI agents — an emerging strategy often referred to as B2A, or business to agent.
The logic is simple: People use brand recognition or loyalty to streamline purchase decisions. AI agents don’t need shortcuts. They reason through every option, and the competitive edge shifts from name familiarity to whether an agent can find and evaluate what makes a property, route, or package different.
"Agents are becoming a new audience, in addition to businesses and consumers," Expedia Chief Marketing Officer Jochen Koedijk said at an Expedia Explore panel in Las Vegas this week. "This is not a transition from consumer to agent, but it's in parallel.""
This is another important signal that the traditional travel funnel is rapidly disappearing. For years, travel followed a relatively linear logic: inspiration → search → comparison → booking
Today, inspiration, discovery and transaction increasingly happen in the same digital environment — whether through AI assistants, social media platforms or integrated ecosystems.
For hospitality, this raises major strategic questions:
Who controls visibility and customer relationships?
How dependent do suppliers become on intermediary ecosystems?
And how should hotels adapt their content, distribution and partnership strategies for these new “social commerce” environments?
TikTok is no longer just a marketing channel. It is progressively becoming a transactional travel interface.
Google has officially published its dedicated “UCP for Lodging” page — and one message is particularly important for hospitality:
- Google does not want to become the Merchant of Record for hotel bookings.
Instead, its Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) aims to enable AI-driven hotel bookings directly within Google AI environments, while hotels keep control over transactions, customer data and post-booking relationships.
This could fundamentally reshape digital distribution.
AI agents may soon be able to:
search real-time hotel availability,
compare rates and policies,
and complete bookings seamlessly within AI conversations.
For hotels, this creates both opportunities and challenges: lower booking friction and potentially stronger direct bookings — but also a growing need for structured data, interoperable APIs and AI-ready commerce infrastructures.
The key question is no longer only: -> “Who ranks first on Google?”
But increasingly: -> “Which hotel can be best understood and transacted by AI agents?”
The hospitality industry is clearly entering the era of agentic commerce.
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