Travel agents and airlines have long competed for ownership of the customer. But AI could change that by becoming the place where travellers begin – and potentially complete – their travel purchases. The advantage AI has is significant: it could know far more about an individual than an airline or travel agency ever could.
In an interview with Travel News, Chief Marketing Officer of FlySafair, Kirby Gordon, posed the following scenario.
“Imagine that, one day, the travel buyer is an AI interface and I simply tell it that I want to travel to London within a particular date range, with certain conditions, for no more than a specified price. The agent could search continually, negotiate, compare complete bundles and potentially play competing offers against one another far more effectively than a human agent or shopper can.”
Gordon said this could create a new type of travel intermediary. Where distribution has historically shifted between travel agents and airlines, AI platforms could increasingly position themselves between the traveller and both.
Lasse Vinther, MD of Automation Architects, agreed, stating that the “new type of agent” would likely be AI agents and large language models (LLMs) with travel booking capabilities.
AI knows the customer
The major advantage these platforms have is the sheer breadth of information they can potentially use to understand an individual.
Travel agencies, airlines and loyalty programmes have traditionally built customer profiles using information such as previous bookings, stated preferences and loyalty behaviour. AI platforms could potentially draw on a much broader history of a person's interests, questions and purchasing intentions.
“Could data-rich businesses eventually become more influential as primary retailers of travel and other services because they understand individual customers better than the underlying suppliers do?” asked Gordon.
Vinther added: “At the end of the day, it’s about understanding the customer and having hyper-personalised results. This has been the ambition for many airlines and for travel agencies for a long time but now it will be about providing personalisation that can compete with the LLMs and AI agent sites,” he explained
“LLMs understand us the best already, whether it is about personal items or professional items, and certainly our purchasing interests. Some LLMs, such as Google’s Gemini, also have access to users' search engine requests and results and are capable of building a broader profile of the user extending far past their relationship with single products. The amount of data they collect about users is unmatched,” said Vinther.
This raises an important question for travel agents. If an AI platform already understands where a customer likes to travel, what they are prepared to spend, the type of accommodation they prefer and what matters to them when making purchasing decisions, could it become the customer's first port of call when planning a trip?
Convenience is key
Secondly, regardless of whether the end user of the booking distribution is a travel agent or a consumer, Vinther emphasised that the key to success would be convenience.
Vinther pointed out that agents were already using more AI to expedite their booking process and so were consumers.
Ultimately, he believes travellers and agents will gravitate towards whichever tools make it easiest to search and compare products, get advice, make changes and complete a booking,
“This is likely how AI will gain a greater share of airfare and travel booking segments,” he said.
AI visibility
Rather than trying to compete for control of these particular parts of the travel supply chain, Vinther suggested that travel agents would likely benefit more from optimising their websites for AI searches to drive more traffic to their products. This means paying greater attention to the information available online about agents’ businesses, areas of expertise and services.
“Suppliers can get a jump start on this by constantly creating fresh content and, eventually, by creating APIs with specific AI agents to ensure that when travellers search for their products, the AI has enough information to guide consumers through their products, refine their decision according to their requirements and then direct the booking to the airlines or travel agents for conversion.” Vinther said businesses should keep their online content current and provide clear, detailed information that AI platforms could interpret and use when responding to travellers' queries.
As AI booking capabilities become more sophisticated, closer technical connections between travel businesses and AI platforms could also allow AI assistants to search products and refine recommendations before directing travellers to a travel agent to complete the booking.
He said this should not be viewed by the trade or airlines as the loss of control over the distribution pipeline but rather as adaptation to inevitable changes to distribution systems and dynamics.
“If AI does become the primary retailer, it is on agents, airlines and suppliers to be masterful at their presentation of their products to remain relevant and drive booking conversions,” said Vinther.
