"29% of people would let an AI agent make the final booking decision before payment, and just 7% would trust an agent to shop and complete purchases fully autonomously.

This is a scary sign of what is about to happen in travel, if you connect the dots.

The biggest impact is likely to be the greatest on consumer facing players. Humans are emotional and irrational at times- two factors which have greatly defined how acquisition, pricing, revenue management is done across the travel buying funnel.

That is going to disappear. The human is no longer behind the wheel, but uses a clever middle-man, the AI agent.

Current textual conversational AI lacks dynamic (intent driven) visual elements like maps, calendars, and imagery. Yet the adoption rates are still staggering due to the convenience they bring.

But these imperfections will be addressed, improvements are only months away. At which point even the high-stake stages of travel booking (e.g. confirming booking, payment) will be delegated to the agent. The convenience is simply way too tempting and addictive.

Then, the 29% will become 90%+ with many disruptive consequences for airlines and hotels. But they will survive, they have the physical asset (aircraft, property), no one wants to manage.

OTAs will feel the heat much more, but likely to survive the storm as they carry some fulfilment liabilities that the big AI players don't want to own. For Metasearch on the other hand the disruption is a real existential threat.

I predict the disruption will start happening in 2027. And it will break 4 major things in travel."

Discover exactly how this exaclty works in practice. Read the full content and subscribe to the Autonomous Travel Tech written by Founder & CEO Houman Goudarzi.