Hello,
Last week had some great “conversations” about the evolution of AI trip planners. Having these in person would have been amazing - but I probably would have had only 2-3 of them. See my column below.
PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.
Best, Martin
Generate 50-200+ enriched MQLs
every month.
Download the brochure ➛
AI Travel Assistants can book, can they fix?
I posted this infographic on Linkedin, the comments are quite insightful, I thoroughly recommend them. Here’s a slightly broader take on that post.
I think AI travel assistants will change how we discover, plan, and book travel. Tell an AI what kind of holiday you want, your budget, preferences, and constraints, and it finds the right destination, hotel, flights, activities and books everything for you, plus gives you a complete itinerary.
There is an argument that people enjoy searching for travel, comparing prices, reading reviews, looking at photos, and building itineraries. And that they wont want AI to do it for them. That might be true (personally I’d rather have AI do most of the work).
But, historically, when technology makes something significantly easier, convenience tends to win. And travel search can get a lot better than it currently is. AI has an obvious opportunity here.
The infographic above lists some 40 AI Trip Planning products (not including the generic AI like GPT, Claude, Gemini which are probably the most used trip planners today). The categories are interesting, Inspiration only, Inspiration + Booking, AI research + Human closing and Human assistant with AI support. I wonder how many of these categories will survive (I have a penchant for the last category).
Other options could be that discovery simply moves to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other general AI platforms? Or OTAs manage to pivot (they’re already acquiring their way into the space) they already have the inventory, and infrastructure. They know how to deal with reservations and have a clue about itineraries. Many AI Planners are moving to the booking part which I think is the minimum. Pure inspiration will most likely sit in the general AI platforms.
But as several comments on my post point out, booking isn’t really the hardest part of travel. The difficult part is everything unpredictable. The flight gets cancelled, the replacement flight arrives two days later, hotel is over-booked, tired children, financial stress, etc. Who deals with all that? (Claude could even ban you if you insult it).
But then historically, OTAs became enormously successful without taking responsibility for the cancellations and problems. So maybe we’re overestimating how much people actually want someone to manage their travel. Maybe they just want an easier way to book, and AI delivers exactly that. Ryanair didn’t become the third largest airline in the world from it’s amazing service alone.
I’d love AI to bring back the personal travel agent, at scale and at an affordable price. But history suggests that making transactions easier and cheaper might be enough to win.
And perhaps that’s the difference between making travel easier to buy and making travel better. I suggest to read the original post, and specifically all the great insights in the comments. Some really great viewpoints in there.
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. The PMS Wars
A public discussion between Founders of Mews and Cloudbeds is peak PMS wars. Should the PMS simply support hotel operations, or should it increasingly guide decisions and workflows? I think this is a discussion for the old world of when interfaces, features and dashboards were designed once and then released. With AI I believe we’re going to see systems have custom user interfaces, and workflows depending on the hotels need. The PMS will do the core heavy lifting and infrastructure - but the rest will be adjusted and designed locally.
HOTEL PMS AUTONOMY
Faces Replaces Hotel Keys
Alibaba’s Flyzoo Hotel in Hangzhou uses facial recognition for check-in and room access, no keys. It’s an interesting experiment of what future of technology experience can look like. Just removing the key is more gimmick than real improvement. But if it means just walking up to one’s room with no check-in that could be cool.
FACIAL RECOGNITION HOTELS
The Invisible Work of Hospitality
This post reminded me of everything tech isn’t addressing in hotels. A hotel employee walks 18,400 steps in a day without ever leaving the property. Fixing TVs, solving breakfast problems, handling deliveries, and speaking with guests. It’s a good reminder that hospitality depends on thousands of small human interactions that are difficult to measure.
HOTEL OPERATIONS PEOPLE
AI Agents and Payments
Anthropic, Visa, and Mastercard are working on infrastructure for AI-powered shopping agents. The interesting part is that payments and identity verification are becoming central to agentic commerce. And in hotels we’re still insisting on giving a card authorization 3 times+.
AGENTIC COMMERCE PAYMENTS
Europe’s Tourism Distribution
Europe wants to generate an additional €22 billion annually from North American visitors by 2030, without sending everyone to Paris and the other major destinations. It’s a good objective, but getting travelers to go to lesser-known destinations has always been difficult. AI could help by recommending places based on interests rather than popularity, but it could just as easily reinforce the destinations everyone already knows. Now is the time to re-think this and use tech to distribute better.
EUROPEAN TOURISM STRATEGY + BETTER DISTRIBUTION
Luxury Hospitality AI
Rosewood’s Friedrich von Schönburg discusses the importance of local culture, artisans, and human connection in luxury hospitality. Technology and AI have a role, particularly in making operations more efficient, but they shouldn’t become the experience itself. Luxury hotels are rarely early adopters, but this time they might become the right way to do it.
LUXURY GUEST EXPERIENCE
The Age of Brand Sameness
Building a new brand has become increasingly difficult in a fragmented media landscape. It was easier before (though not cheaper), with the number of channels now it is like playing whack-a-mole. This article makes the argument that genuine product differentiation matters more than simply creating attractive branding. Hotel brands usually do this well when they start, and then slowly join the sea of sameness as they grow.
BRAND DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY + INDEPENDENT HOTEL DESIGN

Loyalty Is Not Rational
It appears ultra frequent travelers sometimes take unnecessary flights or hotel stays just to maintain their loyalty status. Status and recognition are powerful emotional drivers. Rewards paid by employers and used for private life. Being able to flex one’s loyalty status at a networking dinner. These are powerful drivers. I still think that on a scalability level, Amazon Prime is the epic loyalty system: you pay to become more loyal to the company and the benefits are worth it.
LOYALTY PROGRAM PSYCHOLOGY
AI Commerce Lessons from Shopify
Shopify's latest results suggest that AI-driven traffic is becoming commercially meaningful, with AI channels bringing in new buyers at nearly twice the rate of other channels. AI-driven searches using structured product information is the key. The structured product information is the point where hotels need to get better. Right now, OTAs have the most structured hotel information. That is just a fact.
AI COMMERCE HOTELS
Booking Bets on AI Assistants
Booking Holdings is now supporting Lola and Vayo as part of its exploration of AI-assistants. As I wrote in my column this week, this is a logical place for them to go. And as I wrote a while ago, they’ll have the make it orders of magnitude better than GPT, Claude, Gemini to keep the consumer interface. But they’re definitely investing.
BOOKING AI STRATEGY
Marketing’s New Logic Test
BCG published a study on marketing attribution and analytics that is a lot more thorough than my column on the broken attribution. Their’s actually provides some ideas of what marketers can do and how AI can help marketing see patterns and correlations. Long but interesting read.
MARKETING ECONOMICS
Milka Ad experience
Milka created an where people could only receive free chocolate by physically connecting with strangers between a vending machine and a cow statue. It’s brilliant. And makes for great videos. But, one of life’s big mysteries for me is why is it that the least beneficial (legal) products for human kind have the best marketing. Between alcohol, sugar drinks, fast-food etc. Imagine if we could do great ads for healthy things.
EXPERIENTIAL BRAND MARKETING
The All-In-One Hotel Booking Experience
Since tech has arrived, hotels have separated room bookings, restaurant reservations, spa appointments, and activities into different systems. New booking technology is beginning to bring these products together into a single experience. From a guest perspective, this seems obvious, yet the hotel tech industry has struggled to deliver it. This is another example where tech hasn’t helped the guest experience. But things are changing now.
INTEGRATED HOTEL BOOKING
• How Fast does Google Index content - Link
• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺
• Bookings Travel Predictions - Link
• The People behind the Internet - Link
• AI bootcamp for hoteliers - Link
Did you know: The word "plan" comes from the French word "plan," meaning "ground plan" or "map," which itself comes from the Latin "planum," meaning "flat surface" or "level ground." Over time, the meaning expanded from a physical flat surface to include ideas of arrangement and preparation. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺
As a luxury travel agent, I am finding that I have to correct people’s itineraries that Ai has told them are possible, but are not, in fact, possible. I think Ai is a great tool for initial discovery, and then travelers should take their ideas to a real travel advisor for assistance and execution