Travel Technology

By hiring Meta’s former generative AI chief as CTO, Airbnb showed that AI is no longer a side project — and underscored online travel’s competition for Big Tech talent.

Embedding Gemini in Siri moves Google closer to the moment of intent — but Apple’s privacy architecture could cap how far that intelligence can act. Travel may be the clearest test of those limits.

Google is laying new groundwork for AI-driven checkout. The underlying architecture can also handle more complex transactions, it says, putting travel squarely in its sights. 

Amadeus Nevio is anchoring Lufthansa Group’s retail overhaul, putting the travel tech company deeper into airline commerce — a higher-value role as order-based retail shifts from theory to execution.

Sabre bets that its new agentic-ready APIs can let AI handle shopping, booking, and fixing trips in a single conversational flow, and it’s bringing a live demo to CES. The real test is whether customers trust it beyond the demo. 

Travel Slop, AI-generated info and itineraries rooted more in fiction than fact, risk real reputational harm for travel brands and platforms — particularly those mistaking “'good enough'” content for strategy.

Prism filed for an IPO barely a few hours before 2026. After years of missed windows and pulled papers, the December 31 confidential filing keeps the promise alive while buying time on everything else.

We have answers to some of Ask Skift's most popular questions in 2025, including how travel brands use TikTok and the latest trends in hotel loyalty programs.

Travel’s reliance on legacy infrastructure continues to shape the ceiling for innovation. OnArrival aims to lower that barrier with an open-access platform that gives consumer brands a faster path to launching and scaling travel products.

Air travel has entered a new era, and airlines are redesigning the travel experience from the ground up. For American Airlines, this means leveraging AI, automation, and real-time data to deliver smarter discovery, greater transparency in choice, reduced friction, and enhanced customer care.