Imagine charging someone £10 to stop their car for two minutes, then explaining it is necessary to manage traffic. What complete and utter bullshit.

Imagine driving your wife to the railway station, stopping for two minutes so she can get out with her suitcase, and then receiving a £10 bill from Network Rail, accompanied by a serious-looking explanation that the charge is necessary to manage traffic outside the station. The logic is the same, but would you accept it? I doubt it, so why can airports?

Britain’s airports, however, have turned the simple act of saying goodbye into a remarkably successful revenue opportunity, and successive governments have turned a blind eye even though they are meant to regulate our critical national infrastructure and have an organisation called the CAA collecting millions in taxation from travel companies.

According to RAC research published in July 2026, sixteen of the UK’s twenty busiest airports increased their terminal drop-off charges over the previous year, showing the Government doesn’t care that they are ripping customers off with completely unjustifiable compulsory charges. The average rose by £1.70 to £7, a 30% increase in twelve months. Gatwick charges £10 for ten minutes, Stansted £10 for fifteen, and London City £8 for just five minutes, while Heathrow slaps customers with a £7 fee simply to enter a terminal drop-off zone. Importantly, travellers also pay this fee when dropped off by taxi but don’t pay if they park in the airport’s overpriced on-site parking, boosting parking revenues.

The absurdity of these charges becomes even clearer when you look at the airports’ own car-parking prices. At Gatwick, you can park your car for 30 minutes in the Short Stay car park for £8, yet stopping outside the terminal for just two minutes to drop someone off costs £10. So apparently, parking for half an hour creates less congestion than stopping for two minutes! How on earth does that make sense?

Of course, the airports will argue that they are trying to keep traffic moving outside their terminals, but surely this exposes the real motivation. It is hard to escape the conclusion that these charges have become a highly lucrative revenue stream, conveniently dressed up as traffic management.

Airport operators insist these charges manage congestion, support public transport and help finance infrastructure. Congestion at terminals is real, but charging more does not automatically mean there are fewer cars. Where is the independently published evidence showing how much traffic has been removed, how emissions have fallen, or what it costs to operate these forecourts? Well, of course there is none, as the airports know they are spouting rubbish.

The international comparison makes the British position even harder to defend. The RAC found that none of the ten busiest airports in the European Union charges for a short drop-off, with all non-UK major international hubs managing vast passenger flows without imposing comparable fees. If Paris, Madrid and other busy European airports can provide a brief free stop, British operators ought to explain precisely why they cannot.

Now let’s look at the cash this scam is generating.

Gatwick handled 42.8 million passengers last year and Manchester 32.1 million. Assuming just 40% of departing passengers use the paid drop-off areas, with an average of 1.5 passengers per car, my calculations suggest Gatwick could be pocketing an astonishing £57 million a year, with Manchester collecting another £23.6 million. That’s over 80m million annually from just two airports, simply for allowing motorists to stop briefly outside their terminals!

These are estimates, not disclosed figures, but the real scandal is that nobody seems to know exactly how much airports are making, because they aren’t required to publish separate drop-off revenues. If this is genuinely about managing traffic rather than printing money, why not publish the figures and prove it?

And here is the real scandal: in September, the Department for Transport confirmed in a parliamentary answer that it does not routinely collect those revenue figures. In June, the Government said it had no plans to regulate airport drop-off pricing, describing it as a commercial matter for operators.

However, the rate of increase in charges is finally mobilising voters to rebel and force the Government to carry out a review, and it’s vital that we don’t let the matter drop and keep uniting with one voice to oppose this rip-off.

Let’s be realistic, because although Airports are privately operated, they are essential national infrastructure. Passengers cannot shop around for a cheaper entrance to the same terminal, and families collecting elderly relatives or travelling with small children may have little realistic alternative.

I am not arguing that airports should be forced to provide unlimited free parking, but I am arguing for basic transparency and for airports to be forced to publish drop-off revenue separately and justify why it is collected and what it is spent on.

The Transport Secretary must commission an independent review, with the Civil Aviation Authority and consumer representatives involved, and require airports to disclose the figures needed to verify their claims. If these charges are truly about traffic management, the evidence should be straightforward to produce. If they are primarily about profit, passengers deserve to know, and the Government should step in to control them.

Britain’s airports have made saying goodbye expensive. The least the Government can do is stop saying goodbye to scrutiny.

The Prime Minister’s warning about Russian disinformation and cyberattacks should force the travel industry to confront an uncomfortable question: are we adequately protecting the systems our entire business depends on?

Andy Burnham has described hostile activity aimed at undermining our society and institutions. He has not formally declared war, but I interpret his words as describing an undeclared conflict already being fought through information and technology.

Russia has certainly encouraged that interpretation, as its former ambassador said Britain was directly involved in the Ukraine war following the reported use of British missiles against Russian territory. We do not have to accept Moscow’s justification to take its hostility seriously. Supporting Ukraine is a decision I believe Britain is entitled to make, but we must recognise that protecting ourselves against retaliation forms part of that commitment.

Which brings me to NATS.

We have now experienced four significant failures: August 2023, July 2025, and two further incidents this September. They involved different faults and did not each shut down every part of British airspace. Nevertheless, passengers and travel businesses faced the same familiar consequences: cancelled flights, disrupted holidays, stranded customers, and millions in extra recovery costs.

No published evidence establishes that these incidents were Russian cyberattacks, and NATS has attributed the latest failures to software and connectivity problems. I remain concerned that these may be excuses to avoid panic, but suspicion is not proof. Even if every technical explanation is accepted, an obvious management question remains: why does chief executive Martin Rolfe remain in his job after repeated failures of such economically important infrastructure, despite Airline Heads having publicly demanded his departure?

Clearly, retaining a chief executive does not prove a cover-up. Equally, identifying a software defect does not absolve responsibility for resilience, backup arrangements and recovery. If ordinary faults can repeatedly cause disruption on this scale, the industry is entitled to ask how the system would withstand a determined, well-resourced adversary such as Russia, which might deliberately seek to exploit its weaknesses; so, not being a cover-up is actually more concerning.

For me, attacks on air traffic control now belong among the travel industry’s most serious strategic risks. An attacker would not need to endanger an aircraft to inflict enormous damage, because disrupting the information needed to operate safely would force precautionary restrictions, leaving airlines, airports, tour operators and customers to bear the consequences. That makes operational resilience a national economic priority.

So where is the funding? HMRC’s provisional figures show that Air Passenger Duty raised approximately £4.62 billion in 2025/26, with airlines paying this tax and passing the cost on to passengers through higher prices. Our industry and its customers therefore help generate a substantial annual contribution to the Treasury, which deserves some expenditure to protect it.

Let’s be clear: although the Government presents APD as a tax to discourage polluting flying, the money raised is not ring-fenced for carbon offsetting or carbon capture. It simply flows into public finances, which we should highlight to customers, as it’s morally wrong. But allocating part of that revenue to aviation protection is a political choice the Government can make, and just allocating 5% of the latest annual receipts would deliver an annual £231 million to upgrade NATS and prevent further disruption.

NATS says it has invested over £1 billion in systems and technology over the past decade and plans to seek approval for another billion by 2033, which deserves acknowledgement, but it does not state the dedicated cybersecurity budget or identify an APD-funded contribution.

I am creating a petition calling on the Government to publish a clear funding commitment, independently verified resilience standards, and named accountability for delivery. Sensitive defensive details can remain confidential, but the amount invested and the outcomes expected should not. If ministers believe Britain is under sustained attack, protecting the infrastructure that keeps our skies operating must become a funded priority..

People often assume technology changes industries by replacing what came before, but my nearly forty years in travel have shown me that the biggest shifts happen when customers start looking for products somewhere new, forcing every business to start again and fight for visibility in a new place.

When I started in travel, tour operators committed to flight seats and accommodation to pre-bake holidays that had to be sold no matter what. These holidays were then printed in Holiday brochures in the millions and distributed through thousands of high-street travel agencies, where customers would collect an armful, take them home and spend hours comparing hotels and destinations around the kitchen table.

However, in the latest market, these same tour operators tried to protect their high margins on brochure sales by selling “Allocation of Arrival” Sunday deals at heavily discounted prices. The holiday became a simple data label, e.g., “3 Star Self Catering Majorca departing the 7th of June from Manchester”, which created the fabled “Teletext” medium, where customers sat at home on their couches and watched clunkily designed pages with lead prices that prompted a phone call to the Teletext agent advertising to see what cheap deals they had for departures in the next few weeks. People were buying a cheap 7-night sunshine break and gambling on what they got in exchange for prices as low as £99 per person.

Huge volumes of holidays were also booked over the telephone, via a multitude of different agents, but whenever you asked a holidaymaker in resort who they were on holiday with, they would just say Teletext Holidays, as this was the only brand they ever recognised.

Anyone under thirty will struggle to understand how primitive it was and would just laugh at the idea of taking such a chance on a week of their lives, but that was just how it worked in those days.

Holiday offers appeared as pages of brightly coloured text on a television screen, with no pictures, no search function, and no ability to pause. You would desperately try to write down the details before the page disappeared, or you just had to wait impatiently for it to cycle around again.

Yet Teletext sold millions of holidays.

At Airtours, I became obsessed with controlling the late-sales market because an aircraft seat departing tomorrow had no value the day afterwards. Teletext let us promote distressed stock instantly, generate thousands of telephone calls, and adjust prices as the departure date approached. Success depended on getting the right offer onto the right page, at the right price, before a competitor did.

Then the internet changed everything again.

Suddenly, customers could search for holidays themselves, see photographs, compare prices and book without speaking to anybody. This meant visibility on Google became the new battleground because it did not matter how good your holiday was if the customer never found your website.

Tour operators, online travel agents, and accommodation owners spent billions learning how to appear at the top of search results, while social media created yet another route for customers to discover destinations and share recommendations.

But now we’re back to the start again with the unstoppable march of AI Search.

Increasingly, customers are asking ChatGPT and other AI platforms where to travel, which destination suits their family, which hotel offers the best value, or where to find a lodge with a hot tub for a weekend away. Instead of searching through twenty websites and comparing them manually, they expect AI to understand what they want, analyse the options, and recommend one. That fundamentally changes the commercial challenge. Thirty years ago, travel companies fought to appear on the first page of Teletext. Twenty years ago, they fought to reach the top of Google. Tomorrow, they will fight to become part of the answer AI produces.

To be clear, this will not simply be a new version of search engine optimisation.

AI systems need accurate descriptions, structured product data, current prices, customer reviews and enough trusted third-party information to understand why one holiday is more suitable than another. Travel businesses that keep their product information hidden inside poorly structured websites and PDF brochures may effectively become invisible, no matter how good their holidays are.

The winners will be the companies that make their content easy for AI to find, understand, compare and recommend, while recognising that technology does not remove the need for human expertise. In fact, AI could make every good travel agent dramatically more productive by handling the searching and comparison work, leaving the agent to provide reassurance, judgement and personal service. Expect growth in both shops and homeworkers, as these are highly cost-effective customer acquisition routes.

Let’s also always remember that while the technology may have changed beyond recognition, the customer has not. People still want somewhere to escape to, to spend time with the people they love, and to create memories that last far longer than the holiday itself.

From brochures and Teletext to Google and ChatGPT, the commercial challenge remains remarkably similar: be visible where the customer starts looking, earn their trust and help them find the right holiday before somebody else does.

Like most of you, I am sick to death of supposed experts predicting that some new Google Tool or AI launch will spell the end of High Street travel or take business off homeworkers, but here we go again with the launch of Google’s new AI Travel Agent suite of tools.

Ever since the internet arrived, people have predicted the death of the travel agent. First, websites were going to replace them, then online travel agents, Google, social media and finally mobile apps.

Today, the latest supposed assassin is artificial intelligence, with Google’s AI increasingly able to research destinations, compare flights, track prices, recommend hotels and assist with bookings.

However, I believe this completely misunderstands what AI will do to the travel industry. In my opinion, AI will not replace travel agents but will supercharge them. My consultancy works across several travel businesses, and early indications suggest that using AI tools can boost productivity by 50-70%. Yes, I’m putting my cash where my mouth is, and we are willing to guarantee the lower 50% level if the business is willing to take all our advice.

A travel agent using AI should never again have to spend hours manually searching through dozens of hotels, rewriting itineraries, comparing room descriptions or answering the same basic questions about baggage allowances, transfers and check-in times. AI can undertake the initial research, interrogate multiple information sources, prepare comparisons, draft quotations, produce destination guides and respond instantly to routine customer questions.

This does not remove the agent; it lets the agent spend more time doing what customers value: listening, advising, reassuring, and using their experience to recommend the right holiday.

The real threat to agents is not AI replacing travel agents, but other agents adopting these AI tools before they do, so sit back and think about that over your cornflakes.

An experienced agent who currently handles 1000 customers a year could potentially handle 1,500 or even 1,700 without reducing service standards. In fact, service should improve because customers receive faster answers, better-presented options, and support outside normal office hours. The human agent remains accountable, but AI becomes the engine working continuously behind them.

The biggest issue, which most technology commentators predicting the end of agents overlook, is the customer acquisition cost.

Google may deliver thousands of enquiries, but it charges high fees that, as we have seen time and time again, keep rising until travel businesses no longer make money on the initial booking and instead rely on commission from repeat bookings. If you don’t believe me, just look at the public accounts of On the Beach.

Online travel businesses on average spend 7% of their commissions acquiring a customer. AI search will change where that marketing money is spent, but it will not remove the cost, as experience shows companies controlling the audience will always find ways to charge suppliers for access.

The cheapest source of business has always been personal contact, recommendation and repeat customers. A client who trusts their travel agent does not begin every holiday by searching the entire internet, but simply telephone, email or message the person who looked after them last time. That enquiry costs virtually nothing to acquire, converts at a much higher rate, and depends far less on having the lowest headline price.

Trust is therefore not some soft, old-fashioned concept, but a hard commercial asset that businesses like Designer Travel, Travel Counsellors and Hays own in spades.

That is why understanding Hays Travel’s survival and continued success is something the technology analyst predicting that Google’s new AI tools will dominate needs to understand.

More than 25 years after these same experts confidently predicted that the internet would kill high-street travel agents, Hays continues to prosper and expand. Its group reported a record £80.4 million pre-tax profit for the year ending April 2025, while continuing to acquire travel agencies and invest in its branch network. That is not nostalgia; it is evidence that customers still value accessible people, recognised expertise and somebody they can hold responsible when things go wrong.

The internet did not kill the high street. It killed high-street businesses that offered no additional value, and AI will do the same.

The winners will combine AI’s productivity with the credibility and Trust generated by human expertise. They will use technology to remember customers, anticipate their needs, prepare better recommendations and provide 24-hour support, while ensuring that a trusted human remains at the centre of the relationship.

Ultimately, the shape of the travel market will be decided not by who has the cleverest AI tools but by who can acquire and retain customers most economically, as has been proven time and time again.

Google may help a customer find their next holiday, but a great travel agent can ensure they never need to start with Google again. So I think the question should be “Can Google Survive” in an AI-empowered travel agency world.

n 1999, I found myself working on the 18th floor of the Carlson Towers in Minneapolis, surrounded by McKinsey consultants trying to work out how the internet could revive Green Shield Stamps, or Gold Bond Stamps as they were known in America.

The Carlson family empire had been built on loyalty and had grown to include Radisson Hotels, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Carlson Wagonlit Business Travel and a 50% stake in Thomas Cook. But we were trying to understand how the internet would change the relationship between these businesses and their customers to see whether reviving this age-old loyalty scheme in an online format made sense.

Intellectually, I look back on this period very fondly because it gave me an incredible insight into how the internet would reshape virtually every business sector, particularly travel. Personally, it was much harder because I was commuting back to Britain every two weeks to grab precious time with my family ahead of a permanent move to America.

That move never happened after my wife visited during the summer holidays and decided that emigrating was definitely not for her.

During this period, I coined the phrase “Click, Walk, Talk” to explain how I thought the travel market would develop.

Simple, transactional purchases such as airline seats would rapidly move online as customers learned to click and book for themselves. However, more complex holiday bookings would not follow immediately. Instead, customers would move from walking into a travel agency to talking to someone by telephone, having first found the company by clicking on deals on its website.

My time in Minneapolis had shown me that most travel reservation systems could not cope with millions of consumers suddenly trying to access them directly. They needed an extra layer I called “Mouthware”, where a human being answered the telephone and handled the enquiry while operating the tour operator’s antiquated Viewdata screens behind the scenes.

I therefore built my first internet business, Holidays by Phone, using this model to capture customers migrating away from the gradually dying Teletext market. At the same time, I worked with Tom and Ian, the technology genius I had nicked from Airtours, to build my first dynamic packaging platform.

That technology eventually helped launch Jet2holidays and operated easyJet Holidays for three years as a large part of the holiday market moved beyond walking and talking and became completely comfortable booking online.

In my opinion, the main reason high street travel agencies survived at all was Google’s growing dominance of customer access. The cost of buying clicks rose so dramatically that a shop paying rent on the high street could still compete with an online business paying Google for every potential customer.

Now AI and large language models are about to shift the market all over again.

AI will allow almost anyone to become a travel agent because it puts the internet’s knowledge at their fingertips and can handle much of the administration traditional agents used to do themselves. However, I believe this will make selling holidays more human, not less human, because trust will become the travel industry’s most valuable commodity.

Many unsuspecting holidaymakers will use AI to create and book complicated itineraries, only to discover that one small error can send the entire trip spiralling out of control. When that happens, they will quickly learn the value of having an experienced human on the other end of the line who can sort the problem out.

This will drive the continued rapid growth of homeworkers, although the successful travel agent of the future will also need to be a social media marketing expert. Video will become the primary way to generate enquiries, with customers watching someone they trust before calling to plan a complex holiday.

Cheap bucket-and-spade package holidays will remain firmly online, but even these will change. Customers will stop filling in endless website forms because their digital twins will shop on their behalf, demanding recommendations that match their age, family circumstances, location, preferences and spending power.

Less will become more, because the speed, relevance and accuracy of recommendations will matter more than presenting customers with hundreds of options. Price-comparison platforms such as my own Hey Holidays will become increasingly important because AI recommendations will still need to be checked across the market to prove that the customer is receiving genuine value.

Most importantly, we are about to see a dramatic return to voice. Why would anyone type detailed holiday requirements into an AI search box when they can simply talk naturally and let the technology understand and transcribe every word?

In my opinion, the future will be talk, talk, talk.

Talk to an AI, talk to a homeworker or talk to a travel agent in a shop. The channel may change, but conversation, expertise and trust will once again sit at the heart of selling travel.

I believe we are about to see one of the biggest strategic battles the travel industry has seen since the arrival of the internet, because the three major Global Distribution Systems (GDS) are beginning to understand they have exactly what large language models desperately need: accurate, bookable, real-time travel content.

ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude may be extremely clever, but they cannot currently guarantee that a flight is available, apply a negotiated corporate fare, issue a ticket, change a booking or deal with a cancellation. They can understand what a traveller wants, but they still need somebody else to deliver it, which is where Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport suddenly become incredibly important.

The GDSs have spent decades aggregating flights, hotels, rail, car hire and other travel content, while also building the complicated infrastructure required to book and service it. Their weakness has always been the customer experience, as anybody who has worked with traditional GDS screens or corporate booking tools will understand. The LLMs have the opposite problem: they provide a fantastic conversational interface but lack the reliable transactional infrastructure sitting behind it.

Bringing the two together is the obvious next move, and interestingly, the opening moves have already been made

Sabre has formed the clearest alliance by entering a ten-year partnership with Google Cloud, giving it access to Google’s AI technology and Gemini models. Sabre reportedly has around 70 generative-AI projects underway, looking at everything from travel planning and personalised airline offers to customer service and ancillary sales.

Amadeus initially appeared to have aligned itself firmly with Microsoft and OpenAI. It has been working with Microsoft and Accenture to integrate Cytric, its corporate travel and expense platform, with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, Copilot and Azure OpenAI. However, Amadeus has since signed a major agreement with Google Cloud covering Vertex AI and agentic technology, indicating that it does not intend to become dependent on a single LLM.

Travelport has made the most interesting recent move by partnering with Cognizant and Anthropic, the company behind Claude. The stated objective is to connect AI systems capable of reasoning and planning with Travelport’s transactional capabilities. Travelport also operates within the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, which may allow it to access several AI models.

The chessboard is taking shape, although the GDSs are sensibly avoiding becoming entirely dependent on one AI provider.

But it’s the business travel space that is where this game gets really interesting

Leisure travel receives most of the publicity because people enjoy asking ChatGPT to plan holidays, but business travel is much easier to automate because the rules are already in place.

The AI can know the traveller’s preferences, loyalty memberships, company policy, preferred suppliers, negotiated rates, approval limits and payment details. It can also access their diary and emails, which means an employee could simply say:

“Book me to meet John in Frankfurt next Tuesday, get me there before 10 am and home in time for dinner.”

The AI could identify the meeting, search for available content, apply company policy, compare the total journey cost, obtain approval, complete the booking, and add it to the traveller’s calendar. The employee may never need to visit a corporate booking tool or even know which GDS completed the transaction.

This is potentially a much bigger change than simply adding a chatbot to an existing booking system, because the traditional booking interface could effectively disappear.

The GDS may become invisible but more powerful

Airlines have spent years trying to reduce their dependence upon the GDSs by developing direct distribution and NDC connections. However, AI agents create a massive aggregation problem because they cannot realistically maintain separate commercial and technical relationships with hundreds of airlines, hotel companies, rail operators and car-hire businesses.

The GDSs are therefore the logical organisations to aggregate this content, remove duplicated offers, apply the relevant rules and return something the AI can actually book.

Ironically, AI may make the GDS invisible to the traveller while simultaneously making it more powerful within the travel distribution chain.

Where does this leave the TMC?

Travel Management Companies are not going to disappear, but much of their traditional workload will. Simple bookings, amendments, cancellations, refunds, invoices, policy questions, and even disruption management will increasingly be handled by AI agents.

The successful TMC will need to move away from being a booking operation and become the company’s travel orchestrator, controlling policy, negotiating supplier agreements, supervising the AI, managing duty of care and stepping in when a journey becomes too complicated or important to leave entirely to a machine.

The greatest danger is that Microsoft, Google or OpenAI owns the relationship with the traveller, the GDS controls the content and transaction, and the TMC is reduced to providing an invisible support service when something goes wrong.

The crucial battle will therefore be over who controls the corporate travel brain, because that system will decide which content is searched, how company policy is interpreted and why one flight or hotel is recommended ahead of another.

The LLM may appear to be the cleverest piece on the board, but cleverness alone does not win a game of chess. Control of the board does, and the GDSs may already occupy more of it than most people realise.

I have to confess it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a package holiday, let alone one in peak August, but having a stepdaughter and daughter-in-law who are both teachers rather limits your options when trying to get our modern combined family of five children, plus partners, away together.

We initially chose Ibiza, mainly because it’s Ruth’s favourite destination, but the kids overruled her. They had no interest in Ibiza super clubs and preferred the more relaxed atmosphere of Majorca, with its beaches and, importantly when there are 11 of you, plenty of good but relatively affordable restaurants.

We stayed at the Melia Calvia Beach, which I knew from last year’s ABTA conference, and booked the five-day trip through easyJet Holidays. Everything worked perfectly, although I’d forgotten just how busy a completely full Majorcan hotel can be in August. The sunbed alarm clock was back in operation, while the hotel has cleverly monetised the problem with bookable beach beds ranging from around £25 to an eye-watering £80 for a front-row double bed.

Ruth had also upgraded us to “The Level”, giving access to a private breakfast area, separate pool and free drinks between 4 pm and 6 pm. Unfortunately, the kids couldn’t get in, and there was no chance Ruth was going to sit around a different pool from them, so we hardly used it. Clearly plenty of other people do, though, and from a hotelier’s perspective it’s another clever way of extracting more revenue from the same room.

The holiday ended with a return to the Pirates show after a 20-year gap. The kids barely remembered going in 2005 until we produced the photos. Pirates has been fine-tuned over its 40-plus-year history and today feels much more Cirque du Soleil than the old mass-market Majorcan shows we used to know. They all loved it, and it was a great way to finish the trip.

Unfortunately, my Majorcan experience had started very differently.

I’d arrived in Palma a couple of days earlier with Ian Pattison from Neural River for an AI strategy session with Blue Sea Hotels. We arrived at HM Jaime III at 11.45 pm to be asked whether we were a couple because apparently, we had booked a double bed.

We hadn’t.

My Booking.com confirmation clearly showed a twin room, but after initially trying to blame Booking.com, the hotel eventually admitted they were overbooked. Their solution was to give two men in their 60s a double bed and an extra sheet so we could apparently sleep top-to-toe.

Not surprisingly, we declined.

We found the last available room at another hotel down the road at £340 for the night and I contacted Booking.com expecting them to sort it out. Their AI assistant was actually excellent and quickly escalated the issue to a human agent, who spoke to the hotel while I waited.

What happened next amazed me.

Despite being a Level 3 Genius customer who has booked hundreds of hotel nights through Booking.com, I was told my options were effectively to accept the hotel’s offer of £25 compensation or a free breakfast. The explanation was that Booking.com was simply acting as the hotel’s agent and could do nothing more.

That, for me, fundamentally misunderstands why customers use Booking.com.

I know perfectly well that technically Booking.com may be acting as an intermediary, but customers don’t build their relationship with the individual hotel. They build it with Booking.com. We return because we trust the platform, its reviews, its confirmation and, most importantly, expect somebody to stand behind the booking when something goes wrong.

Overbooking happens. I’ve spent most of my working life in travel and know that better than most. The real test of any travel company isn’t whether something occasionally goes wrong, but what they do when it does.

HM Jaime III failed that test spectacularly, both that night and the following day. Booking.com then had the opportunity to rescue the situation and strengthen a long-standing customer relationship.

Instead, they hid behind being an agent.

I’m now pursuing recovery of the additional cost through my card provider and will publish critical reviews right across the internet. But commercially, Booking.com has potentially lost something far more valuable than the cost of sorting out one £340 hotel room.

They’ve lost my trust.

And in travel, once you lose that, getting it back is extremely difficult.

I’ve always been fascinated by supply and demand because, in the travel industry, it explains almost everything. Long before AI, big data and sophisticated pricing algorithms, the businesses that consistently made the most money were usually the ones that understood demand better than everyone else.

What fascinates me today is that the relationship between airlines and hotels has quietly changed so much that the traditional rules of yield management are starting to work in reverse.

For years, the package holiday dominated the market. A tour operator would buy the airline seats, contract the hotel beds and then use one pricing strategy to balance the whole package. If flights weren’t selling, the operator could adjust the overall holiday price. If hotel demand weakened, they could absorb some of the cost because, ultimately, they controlled most of the supply chain.

Those days have largely disappeared. Today around 60% of holidaymakers still buy a package, but the remaining 40% or so build their own holiday by buying flights and accommodation separately. That sounds like a small change, but commercially it’s transformed the market because airlines and hotels are now playing two completely separate pricing games instead of one integrated one.

Majorca during peak school holiday dates in August provides a perfect example.

Hotel demand has become incredibly strong, helped not only by British and German visitors but also by a surge in Spanish domestic tourism during July and August. Hotels that traditionally aimed for around 80% occupancy are regularly filling completely, and some unfortunately continue to overbook because they know another customer is only a few clicks away if someone doesn’t arrive. Once demand consistently exceeds supply, there is very little incentive for hotels to discount unsold rooms at the last minute because someone else will almost certainly pay the asking price.

What I find much more interesting is what happens on the airline side of the equation.

Low-cost airlines still want to fill every seat they schedule, and once a flight programme has been committed many months in advance, it becomes surprisingly difficult to move aircraft somewhere else. Routes are interconnected, crews are planned, aircraft rotations are fixed and changing one destination often creates expensive operational consequences elsewhere.

So, while hotels are sitting comfortably with more demand than supply, airlines can find themselves discounting flights heavily because customers are switching to cheaper destinations, weakening demand for seats and forcing them to discount heavily to achieve even reasonable load factors.

That is exactly why I’ve been watching August prices with interest.

Flights from the UK to Majorca that were comfortably achieving over £200 during May and June are now appearing for under £100 across the board, despite August supposedly being the busiest period of the year. At first glance, that feels completely illogical until you realise the hotel and the airline are no longer trying to maximise the profitability of the same holiday and are optimising for two completely different businesses.

The comparison with May and June is equally revealing.

During those months, the Germans and Scandinavians top up British guests to provide solid demand, but there are still plenty of empty hotel rooms available. Hotels compete aggressively on price, making accommodation relatively cheap, while airlines can charge more because the total holiday cost remains competitive against destinations such as Portugal, Turkey or the Costa del Sol. Consumers don’t buy flights in isolation; they compare the total cost of the holiday, and today’s online comparison sites make those calculations almost instantaneous.

Ironically, this August you can see the reverse effect by looking at the Canary Islands.

Many of the same hotel groups operate there, yet the economics are almost inverted. Flights are priced at £250 because hotels don’t have enough demand and they are discounting rooms to fill them. The overall holiday price ends up looking similar to Majorca, but the profit is being generated by a different part of the supply chain.

From a consumer’s perspective, that creates an interesting opportunity.

If I were planning an August holiday to Majorca today, I’d probably secure my accommodation first, either by taking advantage of an early booking hotel offer or by finding an Airbnb before the owner fully appreciates how valuable those peak-season dates have become. Once the accommodation is secured, I’d simply wait, as history has shown me that the airline has far more incentive to discount than the hotel does, and with many hotels now offering fully refundable rates, there is relatively little downside if the market unexpectedly moves the other way.

Fortunately for the travel industry, relatively few people outside our sector spend their evenings thinking about yield management, so I doubt this blog will suddenly change consumer behaviour. Even so, I find it fascinating that after decades of airlines leading the pricing game, the balance of power in Majorca’s peak season has quietly shifted.

Today it’s Majorcan hotels dictating the economics, the airlines doing the discounting, and anyone who understands that relationship may well save themselves a surprising amount of money on their next summer holiday.

There are some habits that become so deeply embedded in our lives that we assume they will last forever.

I still occasionally find myself starting to sing God Save the Queen before having to correct myself to God Save the King, despite knowing perfectly well that the Queen is no longer with us, as forty years of repetition is remarkably difficult to erase.

More recently, I have found myself doing exactly the same thing with technology. Whenever I want to find something out, my instinct is still to say, “I’ll Google it,” even though I increasingly don’t. More often than not, I ask ChatGPT instead.

That made me wonder how many other brands have become so dominant that they stopped being brands altogether and simply became the word we all used for an activity.

When I was younger, nobody vacuumed the carpet. They hoovered it. Nobody reached for adhesive tape. They asked for the Sellotape. We all wrote with a Biro, stuck things together with Velcro and listened to announcements over the Tannoy (Yep, unbelievably that’s a brand as well).

None of those words described the product itself. They were simply brands that became so successful they replaced the generic description in everyday language.

However, that reminded me of travel brands that once seemed equally indestructible but no longer exist today. The list is remarkably long, and the first four listed are companies I personally spent a combined 15 years or 40% of my entire working life loving and building.

But today they are gone, and all the work disappeared in smoke

But to be fair, this is typical of most business sectors and just reflects the evolution of business over time as the internet and now AI change the landscape they operate in.

Just look at the pub sector, because if you had walked into almost any pub in Britain during the 1980s, there were certain beers you expected to find behind the bar. Double Diamond, Trophy Bitter, Harp Lager, Skol, Watney’s Red Barrel and Castlemaine XXXX all seemed untouchable. They sponsored sport, dominated television advertising and occupied prime position in pubs across the country. At the time, it would have been almost impossible to imagine many of them virtually disappearing from public consciousness within a couple of decades.

Yet that is exactly what happened.

Consumer tastes changed. Competition changed. Distribution changed. New brands arrived with fresher positioning, while the old giants gradually lost relevance. To be fair, that is how the loss of the major travel brands feels. They simply lost relevance because, overall, they failed to adapt to the changing environment.

I personally think we are likely to see AI become the Grim Reaper for many of today’s household travel brands, but it’s not just Travel AI search that will be impacted; Google itself will be as well.

Now, before anyone writes to tell me that Google remains one of the biggest companies in the world, I know it does. This is not a prediction that Google is about to disappear any more than Hoover disappeared because Dyson arrived. Google will almost certainly remain enormously successful for years to come.

What may disappear is the phrase itself, because even Google has rebranded its AI search Gemini (Twin of Google) to recognise the evolution

The first generation who grow up using AI assistants instead of traditional search engines will never develop the habit of saying “Google it.” If their instinct is to ask ChatGPT, Claude or whatever comes next, then the language changes with them. Exactly as it always has.

The interesting commercial lesson is that dominance is never really about market share. It is about becoming the default behaviour in people’s minds. Hoover achieved that. Google achieved that, but now ChatGPT is starting to do the same.

Many people still think of AI as another piece of software sitting alongside Google, but I increasingly think they perform fundamentally different jobs.

Search engines return 10 blue links to places where an answer might exist, but AI increasingly gives you the answer itself, remembers previous conversations, understands context, and saves you the effort of stitching information together from 10 different websites. Once people become accustomed to that experience, going back to traditional search can feel rather like returning to paper maps after using satellite navigation.

I have spent most of my business career watching supposedly permanent market leaders gradually lose the behaviours that made them dominant in the first place. The travel industry has seen it repeatedly, as demonstrated by the table above. I know many of you will also share my sense of loss at the disappearance of the brands we loved, but at the end of the day, life moves on and so do we.

One of the things that has fascinated me most over the last few months has been watching how quickly AI recording tools such as Plaud have become part of everyday life.

When they first appeared, friends of mine laughed when I told them that I now record every meeting or conversation I have with the Plaud AI tool attached to the back of my phone. Surely you don’t want people seeing how you swear and joke around in meetings, do you? But they are completely missing the point, as my AI Twin already knows how I write up my notes, and not surprisingly, I leave the swear words out of a written summary.

But my pal Mark Sharples, who is a licensed FSA, was blown away when, after he talked me through his handwritten notes on my stepdaughter’s mortgage, I was able to summarise them and send him back a complete set of meeting notes before he even reached for his next beer on the sun lounger next to me in Mauritius.

Like most people, he saw these devices simply as clever note-taking tools that could record meetings, summarise conversations and save people from scribbling pages of notes, but he did not see them as something for him. However, this one meeting summary changed his mind.

However, his next thought was “Christ, how am I going to get compliance to sign this off?” and do I even want to, as this may be the biggest weapon ever handed to a compliance officer with a grudge, because no human is ever 100% compliant with every word or phrase we say.

But the bottom line is that it is better for both the IFA and the customer because every conversation is documented and set out in clear English, which can prevent many misunderstandings.

Also, not having to constantly take notes improves the human interaction of the meeting, with the IFA being able to listen to everything the customer says or often does not say, allowing them to get a better feel of what the customer wants to achieve.

There is another benefit, which I think is even more significant, as most consumers in my experience do not ask enough questions because they simply do not understand the language being used and don’t want to feel shown up.

Financial services are full of terminology that professionals use every day but which can sound intimidating to everyone else. Historically, many people have nodded politely, signed the paperwork and hoped they had understood enough to make the right decision.

However, they can now leave the meeting, ask AI to explain every technical term in plain English, compare recommendations with alternative products, identify areas they forgot to ask about, and return far better informed than would ever have been possible in the past. Knowledge, once again, becomes available to everyone rather than only to the expert sitting across the desk.

But as Mark worried, I also worry that many institutions may end up using AI in the wrong way because the same technology that empowers consumers can tempt them to become increasingly defensive.

If every conversation is analysed, every sentence scored for compliance, every adviser judged against thousands of regulatory rules, and every interaction monitored by AI for potential breaches, there is a danger that people stop having genuine conversations and instead begin reading scripts designed primarily to satisfy regulators.

The customer may technically receive every disclosure required by law whilst leaving the meeting with less understanding than ever, because the adviser has become more concerned with saying the correct words than with ensuring the customer genuinely understands them.

I have seen similar things happen throughout my career.

This was particularly the case at Rock Insurance, when we implemented voice recording of every call. The aim was to capture the best skills of the best salespeople and to show all staff how to close, but what actually happened was that our compliance officer became a little Hitler with newfound power and produced a set of script-reading dummies who were 100% compliant but converted at 32% less because customers were simply bored by the process.

AI gives us an opportunity to avoid making the same mistake again, but I have a nasty feeling many businesses will.

Instead of using artificial intelligence solely to identify mistakes, imagine using it to detect confusion. Rather than asking whether every regulatory statement was read aloud, ask whether the customer genuinely understood the explanation.

Rather than measuring how closely an adviser followed a script, measure whether the customer left the meeting feeling informed, confident and able to explain the recommendation in their own words. These are very different objectives, but only one genuinely empowers consumers.

Technology has always reflected the intentions of those deploying it, and the internet could be used to educate or mislead, while social media could bring people together or drive them further apart.

AI will be no different. Used well, it can create the most transparent relationship ever between financial institutions and their customers, where both sides have access to the same information and leave conversations with greater confidence. Used badly, it simply becomes another surveillance tool that encourages organisations to optimise for regulatory compliance rather than for customer understanding.

The real opportunity is not to use AI to prove that institutions have said the right things, but to ensure that customers have heard, understood and benefited from those conversations. If we get that balance right, AI could become one of the greatest consumer protection tools ever created.

However, if we get it wrong, we will simply have replaced human judgement with digital bureaucracy, and that would be a remarkable waste of one of the most empowering technologies any of us are likely to see in our lifetime.