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.