Every major technology shift creates winners and losers.
When the internet arrived, thousands of high-street travel agencies disappeared. When online booking became mainstream, many traditional tour operators lost market share. Today, AI Search looks set to trigger the next wave of disruption.
The industry is understandably focused on the opportunities. Better customer service. Lower operating costs. Faster booking journeys. However, if I were still running certain types of travel businesses today, I would be sleeping a little less comfortably.
The first and most obvious losers are likely to be people working in travel.
For years, travel companies have struggled with labour shortages and rising employment costs. AI offers a solution that management teams find very attractive. Customer service is already being automated through voice AI and chat agents. Reconciliation teams are seeing AI handle accounting and payment matching tasks that previously required large back-office departments. Commercial teams are using AI to monitor competitor pricing, analyse demand and make yield decisions that once required teams of analysts. Even salespeople are finding their administrative workload being absorbed by AI copilots, so that the most effective salespeople just focus on handling more bookings at the expense of their colleagues, who just get laid off. Travel businesses are increasingly deploying AI agents across customer service, operations, pricing and booking support functions, which inevitably means fewer human jobs.
The reality is that whilst some new AI-focused jobs will be created, far fewer people will be needed to perform many of today’s routine travel roles.
The second group at risk are the Online Travel Agents.
This may sound controversial because companies such as Booking.com, Expedia, Love Holidays and On the Beach remain highly successful businesses. However, their biggest strength has traditionally been controlling customer acquisition.
For twenty years, Google delivered millions of visitors to OTAs. Consumers would search, compare options and eventually make a booking.
AI Search changes that process fundamentally.
Instead of visiting thirty-six websites and spending six hours researching, customers can increasingly ask a single AI assistant to recommend destinations, hotels and itineraries. If the answer is delivered before the customer reaches an OTA website, a large part of the traditional customer acquisition funnel disappears.
Investors have already become nervous about this possibility, causing significant volatility in travel stocks whenever AI booking or AI search developments are announced.
The third group who should be worried are specialist tour operators who believe expertise alone protects them.
I recently met several specialist operators who believed their destination knowledge, personal relationships and specialist expertise would protect them from AI disruption.
I think they may be underestimating the speed of change.
Historically, if a customer wanted advice on a niche destination, they often needed a specialist operator. Today, an AI has the entire knowledge of the internet to call on and can access vast amounts of destination information, reviews, hotel content, local experiences and customer feedback in seconds. Increasingly, it can build highly personalised itineraries tailored to individual requirements. Research is already showing rapid advances in AI travel planning and recommendation systems.
This can then link directly to the same “Ground handlers” and DMC’s that service customers in resort, and DMC’s that service customers in resort need to cut out these supposed specialists entirely.
Many specialist operators may discover that knowledge and access to local partners quickly become commoditised.
The fourth casualty will be travel content publishers.
For years, blogs, review sites and destination guides generated revenue by attracting visitors through search engines to their sites, which they then monetised with click-outs to suppliers. When AI Search consumes that content, summarises it and delivers the answer directly to the consumer, the result is that they are cut out of the process.
Although their content remains valuable if it is not protected from AI search, the website traffic may disappear, and if it’s protected from AI search, the traffic disappears, so it’s the classic zero-sum game where they are bluntly just buggered.
Tripadvisor’s struggles provide an early warning of what can happen when consumers still value the information but no longer need to visit the platform that created it.
However, the biggest losers will simply be businesses that fail to adapt. Anyone can survive this transition, but they need to start by understanding where they add value and making sure they are visible to AI Search.
The evidence unmistakably tells us that travellers are increasingly comfortable using AI for planning and inspiration, and successful travel brands are investing heavily in AI-driven customer journeys and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), the successor to traditional SEO.
That means the challenge is no longer simply ranking well on Google; it’s now about becoming one of the trusted sources that AI systems choose to recommend. The best way to achieve this is to engage with your customers and harvest a large volume of UGC, where your previous customers tell your next customers why they booked with you.
Travel itself will continue to grow. People will still want holidays, flights, cruises and experiences. The demand is not disappearing, but who controls the customer relationship is changing.
History suggests that whenever the gateway to customers changes, the profits move with it.
The travel businesses that recognise this early and adapt their strategy accordingly will survive and prosper.
Those still relying on yesterday’s traffic sources may discover that AI Search has quietly moved the goalposts while they were still playing the old game.