ChatGPT Advanced Voice: The Future of Travel Booking or the Death of OTAs?

If you haven’t experienced ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode yet, you’re missing out on a glimpse of the future of travel booking.

There’s a long history of tech trying to disrupt the travel booking path. Tellme, Alexa, and Siri were all seen as hopefuls to unlock the holy grail: booking a vacation, flight, and hotel over voice. I think we’re far closer to that than we’ve ever been with OAI. Here’s a sample of using ChatGPT as a travel agent for a family trip to Italy:

If you don’t care to listen, I asked ChatGPT, 'Find me a 4-5 star resort in Puglia, with a kids club, near an airport that United flies to, with Hertz EV rentals available. What Marriott options can I use points for?' In seconds, ChatGPT provided tailored answers that would take far longer to piece together manually on Booking or Expedia.

It’s not difficult to envision OpenAI connecting the pipes on the backend to enable real time inventory and pricing, payment rails, and eventually even calling up the hotel or interacting with a hotel or cruise line agent on the other side to get specific details or hard to answer questions. But does this completely disintermediate the OTAs like Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb?

To level set, I want to bring back a flow chart I previously made for my post on the Impact of AI/LLMs on Travel Distribution but updated for a potential future with voice bookings:

Previously, I had discussed the big losers as being Google, metasearch, NDC aggregators and the GDS, but with the advancements in AI what does that look like today?

First, let’s envision a future 12-24 months from now. Everybody will have a phone in their pocket with an AI agent capable of booking travel for them. Envision the audio recording I made at the start but with the ability to book. My credit card, frequent flyer numbers, passport information, and preferences will all be stored as LLMs develop memory, and natural conversational voice AI will make it so everybody has a personal assistant. It’s becoming painfully obvious that this capability will exist in the near future, but if we start with that assumption, we can dig into what the challenges are:

It’s not terribly difficult for OpenAI to just plug into the GDS and get access to around 40-50% of global hotel inventory. More importantly, this is the fat part of the demand curve, and a