"Expedia hasn't had this degree of mojo for many years. Can Gorin and team keep it going?

Expedia Group appears to be gaining competitive momentum, with stronger room night growth and improving marketing efficiency in 2025, according to a BTIG research note published Tuesday.

Based on its performance checks, BTIG expects Expedia to report fourth-quarter results showing high-single-digit room night growth, mid-single-digit growth in its consumer segment, and EBITDA margin expansion. The firm also said Expedia is getting more leverage from its marketing spend — particularly in B2C"

It's true: SEO is undergoing its most significant evolution in decades. As travelers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence (AI) assistants for booking research, hospitality and hotel marketers face a critical question: How do we ensure our properties appear in AI-generated responses, not just traditional search results?

Working with hotel partners across independent properties and major brand portfolios, we have a unique vantage point on how search behavior is shifting industry-wide. The data we're seeing across this diverse portfolio signals a fundamental change in how travelers discover accommodations.

"Model Context Protocol (MCP) is emerging as a key standard that lets AI agents directly understand and interact with travel supplier systems — moving them beyond simple recommendations to real-time booking intelligence.

• For hotels, airlines, and other suppliers, MCP represents an opportunity to bypass high-commission intermediaries and reclaim direct business. 
• Before MCP, connecting AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude directly to business databases was a massive headache. 

As AI agents increasingly become the interface and checkout moves inside chat, MCP integrations will shape which travel providers are visible."

The shift to travelers using AI tools presents a unique opportunity for both consumers and the hotel industry: a chance to break free from dependence on the large Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).  

While AI is poised to transform much of travel planning, AI is limited in its ability to answer traveler questions when information accuracy or detail is critical. To address this limitation, AI companies have begun to forge partnerships and integrations with existing OTAs, who can offer some of the structured, cached data that travelers need to finalize their travel plans. But the unique prices and benefits available when booking directly with hotels are unavailable on OTAs, and OTAs have more limited inventory and availability information than travelers could potentially get from the hotels themselves.

A new AI-native integration layer called the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has created an opportunity for a different path forward. Using MCP, a hotel-aligned aggregator can offer the same advantages to AI companies as OTAs – providing structured, cached, real-time data that travelers need to make decisions and book. And – better than an OTA – such an aggregator can also unify comprehensive hotel inventory across chains and independent properties, presenting accurate Availability, Rates, and Inventory (ARI) data at massive scale. It can also offer prices, offers, and benefits that are only available to those booking directly with hotels, enabling a better AI experience for the 70% of travelers who prefer to book direct.

"With the launch of GPT 5, operator, and a slew of Agentic AI tools, the age of booking a hotel or flight with an AI Agent is upon us. For the consumer it accelerates the ability to digest information, discover, and book hotels, but what about from the perspective of the hotel operator?

Past: Complex Human Centric Flow

Today, when a user has the idea of a “family-friendly boutique hotel in Tuscany under $500 a night with vineyard views” it’s a complex human-centric project. You might start with Google with that query, click around for reviews, blogs, hotel websites, OTA listings, and amalgamate that information into an idea of where you’d like to stay for your vacation. It’s tried and true but inefficient and subject to SEO and OTA reliance. Enter the world of AI Agents and explosive use of ChatGPT, what does it look like."

There’s no argument: A lot of functions in travel will be replaced by agentic artificial intelligence (AI), and it’s happening already. A new agentic AI-dominated ecosystem is on the horizon, prompting many business leaders to look at what the future holds and ask the question: How can my company excel in this new world?

As agentic AI embeds deeper into travel’s B2B and B2C value chain, the need for answers is intensifying. Recent Phocuswright research found that one in three travelers from Europe and the U.S. were using generative AI to plan or enhance their trip, creating the market for agentic AI to come in and do more.

At the same time, agentic AI continues to get better in areas where it is already amplifying human capabilities while bringing in new functionalities that drive new use cases, replacing more tasks but also creating room for innovation. 

Artificial intelligence is changing the way people plan trips—especially among international travelers and women, according to the Global Rescue Fall 2025 Traveler Safety and Sentiment Survey.

More than one in five travelers (22 percent) reported using AI tools to plan a trip, but adoption is notably higher among non-U.S. respondents (30 percent) and women (24 percent) compared to US travelers (20 percent) and men (22 percent). Most respondents (73 percent) have not yet used AI for travel planning, underscoring that while AI use is growing, it’s still emerging among the broader traveling public.

The travel search and booking process has seen many iterations, with the internet, mobile and voice all expected to turn the ecosystem on its head.

While these technologies provided additional channels for consumers and perhaps improved the experience, chaos did not ensue.

Step forward artificial intelligence (AI), which, depending on who you speak to, will either wipe out online travel agencies (OTAs) or boost their presence and power.

However, analysts following the OTAs do not see AI killing OTAs or the search-based travel model.

"As accessible travel continues to grow, Camilo Navarro, co-founder and COO of Wheel the World, believes that more travelers will start conversations about accessibility with artificial intelligence (AI). 

“They're going to need this type of information—accessibility data, for instance,” Navarro said during an interview in the PhocusWire studio at The Phocuswright Conference.

To help users with accessibility needs, Wheel the World, a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2022, is developing a conversational AI chatbot. According to Navarro, the chatbot will use proprietary data and information from customer profiles throughout conversations.

He also believes other travel brands should be preparing their data and making accessibility accommodations visible for AI.

“AI without data is worthless,” Navarro said."

"Google is testing new ad formats for attractions, inserting sponsored links in a booking module with multiple advertisers for the first time."

Planning a dream trip to Japan or that long-awaited European adventure should feel thrilling.  Instead, many travelers find themselves drowning in a sea of booking sites, conflicting reviews, apps, and endless spreadsheets.  When investing potentially thousands of dollars and precious vacation days, the pressure to validate every detail can turn excitement into anxiety.

As an example, travelers choosing a hotel tap into many sources of information – multiple, sometimes dozens of “touchpoints” spread across search, apps, and websites – before making a decision.  According to a Google/McKinsey study: 

“The data [shows] finding travel accommodations is protracted, complex, and sometimes annoying: an average purchase journey for a single hotel room lasts 36 days; hits 45 touchpoints, distributed among search engines and the sites of intermediaries and suppliers; and involves multiple devices.  Travel is a complex, high anxiety purchase.”

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how travelers explore, plan, and book trips. The introduction of Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises a direct line for hotels to provide accurate pricing and availability to AI systems. There have been some optimistic claims that MCP could dramatically reduce hotels’ reliance on aggregators like OTAs.  And there have been counter claims that the OTAs are poised to increase their dominance by becoming exclusive partners to the most popular AI companies.

We believe that even with MCP, the role of aggregators remains indispensable. This paper explains why aggregation is critical in ensuring scalability, efficiency, and trust in the AI-driven travel ecosystem while also noting that there’s an opening here for a new class of aggregator: one aligned with the hotels themselves.

"We’re approaching the first real rewrite of hotel distribution since the OTA boom of the 2000s. AI agents don’t browse websites, they transact. And the systems best positioned to serve them are the ones long ignored because they lived below the funnel.

I’ve written in the past about how hotels can thrive in an agentic AI world as we move from SEO to MCP, as well as the challenges the OTAs will likely face but I wanted to spend some time doing an overview of what technological and product changes the CRS, PMS, and Booking Engine vendors themselves are doing to enable the hotels themselves to take control."

Generative AI use sophisticated large language models (LLMs) to help hotel teams quickly write, summarise and analyse text, images and data. This application of AI can help staff save time and communicate more effectively. In a hotel environment, this can support content based activity like drafting marketing copy or personalising pre-arrival messages to welcome guests. It can also turn large datasets into simple summaries for managers, assist with multilingual guest communication and help frontline teams access information instantly without searching through manuals or document libraries. When used well, it improves productivity across marketing, operations and reporting by removing repetitive work that adds little value.

However, generative AI does have limitations and should only be used in defined areas of hotel operations. While generative AI outputs can seem a bit like magic, it is not built to make precise pricing or forecasting recommendations, nor does it contain the specialised logic needed for accurate performance analysis. It predicts likely words or images rather than calculating the best commercial decision based on demand patterns or business rules. As a result, it works best as a support layer that enhances human output rather than replaces it.