AI in Travel

As the travel industry gears up for the winter holiday high season, please enjoy this guide to our favorite reports of the year.

Model Context Protocol is becoming a prerequisite for AI travel distribution. In the agent era, not being machine-readable will be the fastest way to become invisible.

Offering wide-scale travel experiences is one thing — curating high-quality activities specifically for the world's 850 million Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking travelers is another. With its relaunched app, Civitatis is dedicated to keeping the travel planning process simple and culturally resonant for its global audience of travelers.

The LLMs will need to prove that their agentic AI is so revolutionary that it can capture traveler trust and loyalty. Travel inspiration sites and social media have never been able to do it.

While most travelers are interested in making sustainable choices, only about half actually follow through with more responsible bookings. Industry-wide alignment and AI-driven guidance are becoming increasingly important to close the gap between good intentions and real impact.

TikTok inked a deal to sell a significant portion of its U.S. operation to American investors. The sale may bring clarity, but not comfort, as travel brands wait to see the effect on the algorithms driving discovery.

The company that pioneered MagicBands and transformed queue management into a science is, for now, treating AI as infrastructure rather than imagination when it comes to the guest journey itself. That may be prudent sequencing...or it may be a blind spot that someone else fills first.

Airlines are under pressure to decarbonize, but now they’re pointing fingers at AI for stealing the clean energy they need. The question is whether policymakers will listen.

Any travel brand can now submit apps and get listed in its new app store — which means Booking.com and Expedia, early movers in OpenAI’s app ecosystem, will soon get new competition to own ChatGPT’s travel conversations.

Luxury travel discovery is being rewritten by large language models — and PR has become performance marketing for machines, not just people. Brands still optimizing for yesterday’s gatekeepers risk disappearing from tomorrow’s consideration set.