"The travel industry is locked in a rushed race to build conversational booking experiences. But speed isn't the problem, we're sprinting in the entirely wrong direction.

Over the past year, nearly every major travel player rolled out conversational AI. Airlines, hotels, OTAs, and metasearch engines have all jumped on the bandwagon. But everyone is optimising for a fundamentally flawed medium.

Even the new AI gatekeepers are realising this. Look no further than OpenAI, which recently pulled the plug on its native "Instant Checkout" in ChatGPT after realising users don't want to execute complex transactions in chat.

Recent consumer research points in the exact same direction. McKinsey’s AI Discovery Survey found that planning a trip ranked among the least popular AI-powered search use cases.

Travel is fundamentally different from asking an AI to write an email, summarise a document, or generate code. Booking a trip is rarely about getting a single answer. It's about exploring possibilities, comparing trade-offs, discovering options you hadn't considered, and gradually building the confidence that you're making the right decision.

Users don’t want to text a robot to buy a flight. They want an interface that adapts depending on the situation: a simple search box to book a quick route, paired with natural language to filter for a hotel with highly specific needs. That’s not a chatbot. That is what I call an Intent-Morphic Interface- an experience powered by agentic capabilities that dynamically shapes itself around the user's goal, either on the screen or quietly in the background.

Perplexity finance is a good example of adaptive search experience that leverages familiar visuals finance professionals are used to, while fusing it in parallel with a conversational component."

Find out the 5 reasons why chatbots are the wrong interface for travel, and why Intent-Morphic Interfaces are the inevitable future. Read the full content and subscribe to the Autonomous Travel Tech written by Founder & CEO Houman Goudarzi.