The travel industry has already lived through several fundamental distribution shifts. We moved from high street travel agents to online travel agents. We saw the demise of the Vertically Integrated Tour Operators and the rise of Low-cost Carrier Holiday Divisions. We then moved from brochures to Google search. Then, after all that came the move to mobile booking, the growing influence of review sites and a social media explosion.

But I believe the move to AI could be bigger and quicker than any of these previous shifts.

Over the next five years, AI Search will fundamentally change how UK consumers research, compare and book holidays. Instead of the winners being the businesses with the biggest Google PPC budgets, the new winners will be the companies that can provide trusted information, strong brands and AI-friendly content.

The travel industry is moving from a world of PPC Google blue “links” to a world of AI “answers”.

The shift has already started, as AI Search is already changing customer behaviour. Instead of the short question, Google trained them to ask questions like “Cheap holidays to Greece”; customers can now ask Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude complex questions that state their full needs.

“Where is the best family holiday in Greece for a family with two teenagers on an all-inclusive basis from Manchester in August for a budget of £4,000?”

Ten years ago, Google would have returned ten blue links and several adverts, forcing customers to spend 6 hours and visit 38 sites on average to find the final answer. Today, AI can provide a complete answer in seconds, without the customer needing to visit multiple websites, which is a much better experience that will drive rapid adoption.

Google itself is being forced to destroy its own massively profitable PPC model via Gemini and is investing heavily in AI travel-planning tools that can build itineraries, compare destinations, and recommend flights and hotels directly within search.

This matters because every time an AI provides an answer, there are on average 20 fewer clicks available for travel websites to buy through PPC advertising. That may not sound like a lot initially, but this is already impacting OTA’s website traffic with a 30% year-on-year drop.

As my last blog on TripAdvisor showed, AI-generated answers are also devastating many information-based websites, including TripAdvisor, because users can get answers without even visiting their sites. With AI engines now using MCP connectors to add pricing and availability information and enable in-search booking, this is set to get much worse in the next 12 months.

Although today’s AI search engines still largely provide recommendations and information, tomorrow’s Agentic AI agents will increasingly complete transactions on behalf of customers, with Google, OpenAI and others moving towards agentic AI systems capable of researching, comparing and eventually booking travel products.

Imagine simply speaking to your AI assistant and saying:

“Taking into account my usual preferences, book me a seven-night all-inclusive family holiday in Majorca with good flight times during the school holidays, departing from Manchester, staying in a four-star hotel with a waterpark, for less than £5,000.”

The AI will search thousands of options, compare reviews, analyse flight times and present perhaps three recommendations rather than fifty pages of search results.

At this point, traditional online travel agents face a serious challenge.

Businesses such as Booking.com, Expedia, On the Beach and Love Holidays have built their success on helping customers compare large numbers of options via their websites. If AI can perform much of that comparison instantly, the value chain changes dramatically. Research already suggests that AI search may reduce the historical dominance of intermediaries by connecting consumers more directly with suppliers and using trusted content sources to help make those recommendations.

This does not mean travel brands disappear. Quite the opposite.

I believe trusted brands become even more important.

AI systems need sources they can trust. Strong customer reviews, expert content, recognised brands and genuine authority become critical ranking signals. The future battleground will not simply be SEO. It will be GEO, “Generative Engine Optimisation”, which is about ensuring AI systems understand, trust and recommend your business. Not a simple task.

For UK travel companies, this means investing less in Google PPC budgets and more in building genuine authority. This is why Travel Voice has created the “Travel Book” concept, in which customers are interviewed by AI agents personalised with their booking details, enabling an interactive conversation that results in a professionally written picture-book magazine for them to show friends and family or just document their holiday for future remembrance.

The digital versions are provided by the Travel business for Free to the customer on the basis that they can also use the content to promote the holiday to future customers and to power their responses to AI Search.

We expect that 80% of customers will want to print their holiday books, and when they do, the travel business recovers the cost of the digital production, creating a very low cost of building unique user-generated content about their products.

This is vital because original content, destination expertise, customer reviews, social proof and trusted brands will become the new currency of AI Search visibility.

Ironically, the biggest disruption will come from Google itself. For twenty years, Google has earned billions by selling clicks to travel companies, but AI search, which moves consumers directly from question to answer, undermines this model and requires a complete rethink of the economics of travel marketing. Google is already adapting by introducing AI-driven advertising products that place promotions within AI-generated responses rather than in traditional search listings, but this alone is unlikely to replace their lost revenue. It’s much more likely that the entire business model will move to a CPA model, where Google takes a success-only commission for every travel sale it enables.

In my view, the future is clear.

Five years from now, most UK travellers will start their holiday search by talking to an AI rather than typing keywords into a search box and their digital twins on their phones will reach out to travel businesses via MCP with highly complex requirements and will expect travel businesses to be able to analyse and respond with their recommendations. These will be compared on price, with a short list of 3-5 results presented to the holiday maker, who will then just click to book their chosen option.

The companies that learn how to become the answer will thrive.

Companies that still rely on buying blue links will soon wake up to find the river is dry and they are out of business.