A few months ago, my family and I were planning a trip to Germany. Our 21-year-old son was studying there for the semester, and we decided to visit, bringing along our oldest son and his longtime girlfriend as college graduation gifts to them. The trip would also be personally meaningful: Germany is where my family originated, yet I had never been.
For weeks, my wife and sons exchanged ideas about where to go and what to do, using the
internet and their own experience in-country to sketch an itinerary. I tried a different approach. I gave ChatGPT some high-level information about our family’s preferences and asked it to interview me: to ask the questions it needed to design the trip. After twenty minutes of back-and-forth, it produced a full itinerary: destinations, things to do, transportation options—even dining suggestions.
It didn’t feel like internet research. It felt like chatting with a great travel agent—one who knew me, knew what to ask, and became smarter the more I shared. My family, which had spent significant hours over a period of weeks doing similar research, was blown away by how closely my itinerary mirrored theirs and impressed that some recommendations were better.
That experience highlighted for me three shifts now within reach for the travel industry.
Inspiration no longer has to be a static search; it can become a dynamic conversation.
The trip itself doesn’t need to stop at air, hotel, and car. It can stretch into dining, activities, and cultural exploration to form a truly connected journey.
The line between inspiration and booking can disappear. The dialogue that sparks an idea can also book the reservations.
Taken together, these shifts point to the real promise of AI: the ability to turn exploration into personalization and collapse the distance between dreaming about a trip and making it real.
Today, without access to a pool of ongoing user (individual or group) data, AI simulates data-based personalization by guiding you through questions and iterating quickly based on your feedback. AI tools infer traveler preferences through the conversation, adjusting recommendations dynamically based on your responses. While generic AI tools don’t yet learn permanently across trips, they can refine itineraries within a session based on feedback.
When travelers share their priorities, AI can shoulder much of the tedious planning. Today, that may mean aligning preferences with available flight or lodging inventory. But as real-time data access improves, it will mean sequencing entire journeys, weighing trade-offs, and tailoring recommendations in real time. When AI is given access to valuable data sets like booking history or loyalty program data, it can combine large-scale patterns with the specific cues it gathers in an individual conversation to understand what makes a “great trip” for you, and then help make it happen.
My Germany trip was an early glimpse of that future. What felt like an experiment with a chatbot will soon be the default way itineraries are imagined and confirmed, with inspiration and booking happening in a single flow.
Removing friction in the travel industry means confronting the legacy web of travel technology. Much of the industry still runs on systems built for an era of telephone agents and printed timetables: Global Distribution Systems (GDS) with green-screen interfaces, monolithic reservation platforms that update in overnight batches, and siloed loyalty programs. These systems are (mostly) reliable, but rigid.
Many companies are trying to modernize, e.g., airlines experimenting with NDC content. But progress has been uneven, and gaps remain, especially for smaller suppliers and independent hotels, local tours, and experiences that still operate outside of major distribution systems.
Anyone who has tried to rebook a disrupted flight knows the pain of this architecture. You wait in line or on hold while an agent searches for options one by one because the system cannot dynamically recombine inventory. The same happens with hotel bookings: a traveler might have points available for an upgrade, but the reservation platform can’t communicate with the loyalty engine in real time, so the upgrade is missed.
79% of travel agencies see their legacy tech as a barrier to digital transformation, especially around drops in bookings due to failed transactions, frequent system outages, and inability to adapt to customer expectations. AI offers the promise of a way to route around these limitations, e.g., pulling live inventory from multiple sources, reconciling loyalty data with supplier systems, and even interacting with consumer-facing websites to capture availability when APIs don’t exist. And in time, AI agents will be able to monitor trips in progress, detect disruptions, and proactively suggest re-routing before the traveler even asks.
To be clear, this is not the current state of play across the board. But this is the direction of travel, and we already see pieces of it emerging. Scaling requires more interoperability, more willingness to share data in real time, and a greater level of earned traveler trust.
The push to overhaul the status quo is heating up. The “AI concierge” is no longer hypothetical. It is a role travelers are already beginning to expect. 80% of travelers across 14 countries now use generative AI tools in some way, whether for discovery, research, or other planning tasks. Most say they trust these tools if they are transparent and useful.
In the hospitality sector, 52% of guests expect generative AI to play a role in their interactions like check-in or support, and 56% say they would use it for restaurant recommendations. That suggests the “soft edges” of travel (dining, local activities, support) are where trust and value can build quickly. I felt that value and trust myself with our Germany trip. The AI-generated itinerary was not just “good enough.” It was genuinely useful and, in some ways, better than what my family had created manually. That gave me confidence to build on it—it earned my trust. That confidence will drive adoption more broadly.
Our own iSeatz data shows younger travelers are leaning in hardest. Millennial and Gen Z travelers are not just open to AI; in many cases, they expect it.
Consumer travel will always be about people, experiences, discovery, and the memories we keep with us for years after returning home. Technology’s role is to enable those, not overshadow them.
Technology doesn’t have to strip humanity from travel. It can give travelers more time to focus on it. And when the system extends beyond flights and hotels to include dining, cultural activities, and local exploration, the connected trip becomes real: a single conversation that designs and books an entire experience. AI has the potential to make this a reality.
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