AI is changing who gets considered before a booking ever happens

For OTAs and tour operators, the most important question about AI is no longer whether it will change travel. We’re already seeing it happening. Now, the focus is on whether or not businesses know where the change will happen first, and whether they are suitably prepared for it.

Much of the travel industry's attention thus far has focused on AI in the booking process: smarter search, faster checkout and AI-assisted customer service. These are areas where AI has proven value, and important considerations. But for OTAs, tour operators, and travel retailers, there is another shift happening before a traveller reaches a booking flow at all.

It is happening at the point of discovery, when travellers decide where to go, what kind of trip they want, and which brands deserve consideration.

That moment used to belong largely to travel brands themselves, especially those that invested in strong digital marketing strategies. But now, it seems increasingly, that it belongs to AI.

The journey used to start with you

For the better part of two decades, the OTA homepage was where travel discovery began for a significant proportion of travellers. The browsing behaviour, the destination inspiration, the filtering by price and date, all of it happened inside environments that OTAs and tour operators owned or had paid dearly to be visible within.

The rules were broadly understood, invest in SEO, run paid media, build content, be present in metasearch, the traveller would eventually arrive, and the transaction would follow. Those rules are changing faster than most organisations had anticipated.

Travelport's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Jordan captured the shift recently: AI is already changing discovery, but booking remains the challenge. The challenge is no longer getting travellers through a booking flow. It is being part of the conversation before that flow begins — inside the AI assistants and generative platforms where a growing number of travellers now start their journey.

"The traveller is building their shortlist before they ever reach your website. If your brand isn't being surfaced at that stage, you're already competing from behind," says Roy Stratford, Director of Retail Media at Platform 195.

What AI discovery actually means for your customer

The AI-assisted travel planning experience is not simply a faster version of what came before. It is structurally different. A traveller using an AI assistant to plan a holiday is not browsing a grid of results ranked by price. They are having a conversation, describing what they want, being asked clarifying questions, receiving recommendations that feel personalised to their specific situation.

The inspiration-to-shortlist journey, which previously took days of browsing across multiple platforms, is being compressed into a single session.

Tony Carne, founder of Everything AI in Travel, made a point in a recent Karryon podcast that cuts directly to what this means for the industry. AI does not erase the human dimension of travel. A trip is emotional, aspirational, and deeply personal — and no AI interface fully replicates the trust a good travel advisor builds, or the reassurance they provide when something goes wrong. But AI does strip away the transactional layer that used to sit between traveller and brand. The repetitive parts of travel planning, the research, the comparison, the option-narrowing, are increasingly being handled before the traveller ever reaches a booking platform.

According to Phocuswright's research on the decade ahead for travel professionals, social media is already the leading source of initial trip inspiration for Gen Z and millennial travellers.

The incoming Gen Alpha cohort will raise those expectations further, a generation shaped by instant interaction and short-form content, who will bring even shorter attention spans and higher expectations of relevance to every travel interaction.

"The traveller arriving via AI discovery is a different kind of customer than the one who used to arrive via Google. They know more, they want more, and they are less patient with experiences that feel generic. That is a challenge for businesses built around broad inventory and price competition. It is an opportunity for businesses that have something specific and distinctive to offer," says Roy.

AI recommends specificity

One conclusion is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: AI does not recommend vague brands.

Recommendation systems work by reducing complexity. When a traveller asks for advice, AI looks for brands it can confidently describe, explain, and differentiate. At Phocuswright Europe, experts exploring how generative AI is reshaping brand visibility across travel recently reached the same conclusion: discoverability in AI surfaces is not a content volume game. It depends on the richness and structure of data signals, the consistency of brand representation, and  critically, the clarity of positioning.

That creates a specific challenge for businesses whose value proposition is built primarily on breadth. Offering everything to everyone may have worked in a search-led world however in an AI-led discovery environment, it becomes much harder to stand out.

Visibility in AI-generated recommendations does not automatically go to the biggest brands, instead it goes to the ones that are easiest to understand.

"For years, the industry assumed more choice was always better. AI changes that. If a traveller asks for a recommendation, the system needs something specific to latch onto. The brands that get surfaced most often are usually the ones with the clearest proposition, not the biggest inventory," says Roy.

To respond to this shift, travel retailers need three things; a clear and differentiated proposition, structured and discoverable content, and the internal capacity to adapt quickly as customer behaviour changes. Each of these is a strategic asset that becomes more valuable as AI plays a larger role in discovery.

In January, Platform 195 published The New Commerce Marketing Playbook, which mapped four interconnected pressures already reshaping how OTAs and tour operators win demand: compressed discovery, platform-controlled influence, content inflation, and opaque performance. The dynamics playing out now, AI shortlisting brands before a booking flow begins, visibility determined by data quality rather than spend, content that must inspire and signal simultaneously, are the same forces the playbook identified then. What has changed is the pace.

The operational gap

Discovery is only part of the challenge. As AI-assisted planning becomes more common, travellers arrive with higher intent and higher expectations. They expect relevant answers immediately and they expect brands to understand their needs from the outset. Adding to this, they have little patience for experiences that force them to start over.

For OTAs and tour operators, this creates a new operational reality. Success is no longer determined solely by whether you attract attention. It depends on whether your organisation can respond at the pace modern travellers now expect.

Phocuswright's research is direct on this point: if a traveller can get an instant answer from a chatbot, waiting 24 hours for a reply to an email feels like a failure of service. Younger travellers have been shaped by digital environments where communication is immediate and information is always available. They bring those expectations into every travel interaction.

Many travel businesses are discovering that this is as much a resourcing challenge as a marketing one. Maintaining relevance requires a level of execution speed that internal teams often struggle to sustain alongside day-to-day priorities.

From recommendation to booking

Being recommended by AI is not the finish line, rather it is the start of a new expectation. Travellers arriving from AI-assisted planning tools are often further along in the decision-making process than traditional search visitors. They know broadly what they want and why they have been directed to a particular brand. That creates opportunity but it also raises the standard.

Slow responses, generic landing pages, and disconnected customer journeys feel even more jarring when the traveller has just come from a highly personalised planning experience.

Amadeus's early AI commerce pilots illustrate the scale of this opportunity: AI-driven visitors reached booking engines at 44.7%, compared to 25.9% from organic search – nearly double. But that conversion advantage is not automatic, it depends on the landing experience meeting the standard the AI created.

Rich, emotionally resonant content is what bridges that gap, destination storytelling, video that captures the genuine character of an experience, creative that speaks to a specific kind of traveller. Platform 195's client work consistently shows that video content significantly increases conversion rates and lifts average booking values. The traveller who arrives pre-qualified and then encounters content that speaks directly to what they were looking for is the traveller who books.

The human dimension matters here too. The number of travel agents globally has doubled over the last decade, not declined. What AI has done is not remove the human from the travel equation. It has raised the bar for what that human layer needs to deliver. Travellers who have been through an intelligent, personalised AI discovery process arrive expecting expertise and reassurance that a machine cannot replicate. That is the opportunity — for the businesses whose content, creative, and customer experience are positioned to meet it.

"The brands winning in this environment are the ones whose creative and content make a traveller feel understood from the first click. That is what converts a pre-qualified AI referral into a booked holiday — and a booked holiday into a returning customer," says Roy.

The value of being recommended

AI is changing who gets considered before a booking ever takes place. For OTAs and tour operators, that makes discoverability a strategic issue rather than a marketing one.

The brands that succeed will not necessarily be the largest, the cheapest, or the most visible in traditional channels. They will be the brands that AI can understand, explain, and recommend with confidence — and that can deliver an experience good enough to justify the recommendation when the traveller arrives.

That requires clarity of proposition, strong discoverability foundations, and the operational capacity to respond at the speed the market now demands. The brands that win in the next phase of travel won't simply be the easiest to find, they'll be the easiest for AI to understand, explain and recommend.

The question is whether your brand is one of them.

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