It isn’t a universal truth, but a vast number of goods and services have their own full-circle moments. While there are still plenty of travel agencies in the U.S., the overall number is still down considerably from a peak in the 1980s. For some industry forecasters, though, the future looks a lot like the recent past, except that instead of travelers trusting human agents with making their travel plans a reality, they’ll use AI agents for the same purpose.
Late last year, McKinsey senior partner Jules Seely predicted that rapid changes could be coming to the industry — affecting everyone and everything from human travel agents to online booking portals — “if AI agents become able to reliably execute the full travel booking process with little human oversight.”
It’s notable that Seely wrote “if” rather than “when.” Skift Founding Editor Dennis Schaal recently looked at the role that AI agents could play in booking travel, and what that could mean for online travel agencies like Booking.com. Could AI agents cut into online agencies’ business the same way that those companies affected more traditional travel agencies? While he observed that hotel chains are expanding what they use AI for, Schaal is skeptical; he cites comments from Jake Fuller, an analyst at BITG.
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From internal goals to external certifications“[W]e continue to see OTAs as partners of choice given breadth of supply, global payment networks, service infrastructure [and] hefty advertising budgets,” Fuller wrote. As Skift reports, Fuller also noted that large hotel chains don’t represent the majority of businesses than online travel agencies work with.
“The same AI platforms working with Marriott and Wyndham are also working with Booking and other OTAs,” he wrote. In other words, history isn’t necessarily repeating itself here; instead, it’s heading into different territory.
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