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At Skift Global Forum, Sierra CEO Bret Taylor argued that AI agents could connect booking, service, sales, and loyalty into a more seamless customer relationship, organized around the traveler rather than a company’s internal structure.
Agoda gives Booking Holdings a foothold in Meta’s Muse in Singapore and Japan, while Expedia holds the hotel slot in North America. The real question is the economics: if Meta takes a fee, hotels could pay twice for the same booking.
AI could give travel consolidators a new way to improve the companies they buy. The question is whether the gains are real, repeatable, and worth the price of admission.
Travelers do not separate a connectivity failure from the rest of their trip. Airlines, hotels, platforms, and connectivity providers must build reliable access into the journey before AI raises the stakes.
The Super 8 and La Quinta franchiser is opening its inventory to Meta's Muse, OpenAI, and Instinct. Morgan Stanley analysts think AI agents could cost hotel groups less per booking than online travel agencies do.
The travel industry is racing to embrace AI, but still struggling with fundamental questions of trust, coordination, and commercial returns. We surveyed executives at Skift Global Forum 2026 to understand where the industry sees opportunity and where its biggest concerns lie.
Meta already influences where people want to go. Its AI agent is primed to help it take a cut when they book.
Real-time personalization can help travel brands earn loyalty without defaulting to broad discounts — but it works only when brands put preference data to use quickly and deliver an experience that matches the marketing promise.
AI discovery is moving closer to transaction. Travel brands must become legible to machines without surrendering the memory, service, and loyalty advantages that set them apart.
Europe’s overtourism fix depends on two systems it doesn’t control: AI search that favors the obvious, and overly complicated transport that discourages the curious from visiting less familiar places.
AI’s value in travel will come down to execution. As it moves into core workflows, travel companies will need to build the integration and governance required to make AI a dependable part of everyday operations.
For now, AI personalizes the message, but it doesn't personalize the recommendation.
With AI changing the face of online discovery, many tourist boards and destinations are grappling with how to finesse the message. For Tourism Ireland, this has prompted it to measure how often it is shaping the answers that AI provides.
Every new travel assistant wants to simplify my life, starting with another introduction.
Booking already has tools that organize trips. Vayo's proposition is that AI can turn the itinerary into something more: a system that learns how you travel, watches the entire trip, and starts working before you ask.
Under stricter regulation across a fragmented travel market, executives overseeing AI in European travel operations are now being forced into nuanced and challenging conversations.
Skift's Data + AI Summit in Europe this week just showed that AI may be changing travel distribution and internal operations, but booking volume is another story.
Four years after Flyr bought its way into hotels, it's handing the unit to one of the two rivals Skift said it would have to beat.
Amex GBT may be a software, payments and meetings company for business travel, but it’s also selling trust — and its chief privacy officer said that’s what it built its AI governance around.
Travel AI wins when it removes work without removing the parts of travel people actually want to enjoy.
