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Algorithms already shape the way we travel. AI will soon turbocharge that influence, and brands that move early will benefit most.
How travel and hospitality brands can get ahead of the coming wave
- Make your values explicit and verifiable. If sustainability, inclusivity, or ethical sourcing are part of your brand, surface them clearly. Use third-party validation, structured data, and transparent language that both people and machines can parse.
- Invest in emotional differentiation. In a future of machine-made decisions, the brands that resonate emotionally through design, tone, stories, and purpose will still have an edge. Trust, warmth, and humanity will matter more, not less.
- Think beyond loyalty programs. Build dynamic, data-rich guest profiles that allow you to personalize experiences across stays, channels, and contexts; not just reward transactions.
- Design for discovery. Don’t wait to be found. Package unique offerings in a way that can be surfaced by AI agents – think experiences, not just rooms, motivations, not just amenities.
- Anticipate intent, not just respond to it. Use your own data (and partnerships) to build models that predict why someone is traveling, not just when or how. Then meet them there with relevance.
Algorithms quietly shape nearly every digital decision we make, from what we watch and buy to where we travel and stay. Hoteliers use them for revenue management, to optimize inventory, for marketing automation, and to manage devices throughout their properties. In the context of choosing travel, algorithms nudge people towards decisions through search, mapping, ad targeting, and travel platforms like TripAdvisor or Google Travel. Social media plays a big part, especially in the early stages of the funnel through feeds or discovery algorithms. But this is still early days for its role within the end to end customer travel journey.
Right now, we’re in the first phase where people are being shown ads and nudged toward certain destinations or products based on what they’ve clicked on, searched for, or shown interest in. Behind the scenes it’s an auction: businesses are competing to get in front of the right person, at the right time, on the right platform.
With the rise of generative and agentic AI, we’re approaching a second phase where algorithms won’t just influence travel decisions. They’re going to make them for us. A personal AI agent could plan, compare, and book your entire trip based on your preferences, budget, and past experiences, with very little human input. So if phase 1 is about influence, Phase 2 is about delegation.
This next phase will be shaped by five key dynamics:
Personalization becomes predictive
Personalization has been a key focus for hoteliers for years. Before the internet, personalization meant remembering a guest’s favorite drink. As tech advanced, it moved into CRMs, apps, marketing flows, and on-property tracking.
As AI becomes embedded in the software, it will move from being manual and reactive, to acting proactively. Instead of nudging people with targeted content, AI will increasingly act on their behalf: filtering, prioritizing, and even booking travel decisions based on a deeper understanding of their intent, context, and values. It would anticipate needs before they arise. For instance today, a hotel might email you about spa hours after you’ve checked in. But tomorrow, your AI assistant will book a massage before you arrive.
This will allow brands to learn about customer preferences beyond the boundaries of the hotel data to the larger web, and match them with ideal guests. It should create moments of delight, helping guests discover things they didn’t know they needed, and delivering the right experience at the right time. This will likely happen when access to personal data is monetized.
Decisions happen in real time
When people choose to travel, there’s always been a correlation between time and distance: the farther the destination, the further in advance they booked. This also depends on the traveler type (i.e. spontaneous VS planned, young VS old, etc), but this rule largely holds true because people generally like certainty and want to avoid hardship or discomfort.
But as AI and agentic AI take a bigger role in the decisionmaking, the timeline for exploring and choosing travel is likely to shorten. Part of the reason is that AI has made it easier to explore and book based on preferences. It also enables buyers to get better deals, have better weather, fewer crowds, and act more impulsively (e.g. booking a trip to a tropical island whilst working in an office on a dreary winter day) or to serve needs that are more “in the moment”. I did this recently when I saw the first South swell of the season rolling into Costa Rica the following week where my workload was light. In my younger days this was impossible not only because I couldn’t afford it, but the swell forecast was vastly more advanced and allowed me to do some projections that narrowed down the right time and destination that matched my calendar.
The human touch still matters
While technology takes a bigger role in the travellers’ decisonmaking process, humans will still be vital within the ecosystem. It’s hard to say how we’ll relate to machine opinions once they’re part of our everyday lives. But given our hard wiring and thousands of years of lived experience and culture, I’m inclined to think that we’re going to value real human interaction – at least in the short term. These human interactions show up in a lot of places throughout the travel buyer journey as stories, reviews, and social proof. After all they’re going to make their decisions based on how the brands make them feel; not just how much money they’ll save or how nice the sheets are. So being successful in the algorithm rich future is not just staying ahead of the technology curve, but creating differentiation through emotional resonance, trust, and aligning to the right values.
New categories surface through data
As a company we’ve done a lot of exploration and validation around the idea that aligning to the right travel motivations leads to better fits, increased engagement, more loyalty, and higher margins. And we think that AI will make this strategy even more effective.
The travel marketplace has seen the emergence of niches like sustainability, transformation, culinary, or just to unplug. Traditional (digital) marketing has been reaching these audiences through micro targeted paid media, SEO, social, email, and travel/lifestyle influencers. As AI starts choosing travel, it could uncover ultra-niche products that align with a traveler’s known or unknown preferences. It might even predict future preferences and nudge travelers toward experiences they didn’t even know they wanted. Zooming out to the macro, AI will likely predict future trends, travel patterns, and new categories that can be exploited by savvy marketers and brands.
Values are a sorting mechanism
Since we have an unabashed bias towards the topic of travel motivations, I want to dig into the aspect of AI making decisions on behalf of the traveler. As AI models learn from a user’s preferences, instructions, and past interactions, they’ll naturally shape their responses to reflect that person’s values. It will filter the world before you even see it. What it hides or surfaces won’t just reflect data, but the values. That means motivations like escape, connection, or status won’t just influence copy; they’ll determine the way people find things. Our framework, which segments travel motivations into intrinsic and extrinsic drivers would become even more relevant in this future.
So in targeting the right audience, it won’t just be about predicting the users’ intent, but making sure the values of your brand and product align with them. Sooner or later this is probably going to be table-stakes for brands rather than a differentiation, so there’s an opportunity to get ahead of this curve by being more explicit with your values and positioning. And making sure your positioning is machine readable.
