Travel Technology

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.

Travel today is both precious and precarious. Guests are investing more emotionally and financially in each trip, and even minor disruptions can derail experiences they see as once-in-a-lifetime. While flexibility…

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.

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.

Travel venture capital is no longer in freefall — but it is far from fully recovered. Now defined by discipline, funding is concentrated in fewer, larger bets on proven companies.

Expedia and Booking are trying to be both the storefront and the supply chain. AI is squeezing the middle, and “doing both” starts to look less like diversification and more like diluted power.