Artificial Intelligence’s adoption among travellers and travel companies is rising at record speed, but there are concerns that this is changing the industry’s economics, interfaces and power structures faster than many companies can adapt.
Speaking at the recent Phocuswright Europe 2026 conference, OAG’s ceo Filip Filipov explained that the travel industry is heading into its most significant interface shift since the rise of online booking, with the current search-driven model used in GDSs and reservation systems no longer suited for an AI driven world.
AI uses agentic systems, and Filipov warns this could make today’s backend architecture unsustainable. His comments on the sector’s preparedness for AI were followed by those of Phocuswright’s Mike Coletta, who revealed that only 12% of travel companies felt ready for AI last year, and just 6% were using agentic AI at scale. While he estimates that number is now closer to 17%, he notes most companies remain early in their transformation.
. . . Human Touch
The talk of AI also highlighted the human touch as remaining necessary.
Coletta says more than one third of European travellers now use AI for trip planning, this rising to 56% in the US, though he says trust remains low with travellers still favouring friends, family and human agents.
It was also noted that LinkedIn data shows a 25% rise in people with ‘travel agent’ in their title, further underscoring that human expertise remains in demand. Coletta says the winners won’t be the companies that cut labour. “They’ll be the ones that use AI to do one hundred times more work.”
