The adoption curve for generative AI in travel has no precedent in the modern hospitality industry. According to research, 56% of American travelers are now using AI to plan, book, or navigate their trips. A year ago, that figure was 14%. This shift is happening even faster than the collective move to mobile, and unlike that era, most travel and hospitality brands have not yet caught up and restructured their digital experiences around it.
Meanwhile, the underlying market has never been larger. Both global and US domestic travel have recovered beyond pre-pandemic levels. BCG projects the global leisure travel economy will reach $15 trillion by 2040, driven largely by domestic travel growth and a generational shift in spending patterns. Millennials and Gen Z are planning significantly more trips than older generations, and they are disproportionately the ones using AI to do it.
As demand is expanding, the way travelers discover, evaluate, and choose brands is transforming underneath the industry in real time. Digital experience leaders in travel and hospitality that understand these themes will ensure their brands are ahead of the curve. The ones that do not might spend the next few years wondering where their traffic and conversions went.
If your content is structured, distinctive, and factually grounded, an AI system will recommend you to a smaller but far more intentional audience. If your content is generic, undifferentiated, or poorly structured, you may not appear at all.
The discovery layer is being rewritten
For the last 20 years, when you wanted to reserve a hotel or book a ticket you’d start your journey on a search engine. You typed a destination into Google, scrolled through results, opened tabs, compared prices, and read reviews. There were entire acquisition strategies built around ranking for the right keywords at the right moment, because SEO predictably led digital traffic to your brand’s homepage.
The starting point of most journeys has moved
Travelers are having conversations with AI systems that compare options, assemble itineraries, and surface brands based on structured data and declared preferences, often before a brand's website is ever loaded.
This behavioral change is consequential and it’s compressing the travel booking funnel. Traditionally, brands would compete for visibility at the top-funnel and on trust through the middle. In today’s AI-mediated funnel, the awareness and consideration journey stages compress into a single interaction. The AI system sits in between the marketer and the customer and it does the initial research. Your guest’s AI does the filtering and ultimately decides which brands to recommend. That means your marketing team should be writing dual-purposed content that both resonates with their human audience and can be parsed, interpreted, and confidently cited by AI systems.
One of the more interesting takes I have heard from a digital leader at a luxury hotel brand is that, "we’re measuring less traffic, but it’s more qualified and converting at a higher rate".
SEO is transforming into what many digital marketers are calling GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and the playbook is fundamentally different.
Excellent experience strategies in travel and hospitality use AI to amplify human connection, not replace it. Their digital teams are connecting guest data, stay history, and behavioral signals to deliver personalized recognition during the moments that matter.
Essential human elements of hospitality
Human connection is hospitality’s most distinct value. At a conference last month, a barista greeted me by name on day two and I tipped her gladly, only realizing afterward that my lanyard nametag had quietly done the work. The recognition still felt good, because being seen, even with a little help, beats being another face in line. Personalization works the same way for brands across digital channels, anticipating what customers need based on what they’ve done before. As AI begins to automate some of the work required to deploy digital personalization, it’s essential to ensure human marketers are involved to preserve the authenticity and engagement.
Assess your brand’s experience strategy readiness
The journey should follow the guest, rather than forcing them to follow the journey your brand designed. Atlantis the Palm, for example, used pattern-matching to deliver personalized special offers and measured a 46% increase in value per visit. Meanwhile, EasyJet airlines achieved overall booking conversions up 6%, with bookings doubling in a single campaign window.
What connects these examples is that none of them replaced human judgment with automation. They used data and marketing technology to extend the reach of a human-designed experience strategy. The guest felt more known, and in every case, the financial impact was significant and measurable.
I think the brands that get personalization right in the next few years will create a kind of compound loyalty that is very difficult for competitors to replicate. Once a guest feels genuinely recognized, the cost of switching to another competitive brand becomes emotional, not transactional. Loyalty point programs can’t compete with that.
Marketing capacity and more agents
Marketing budgets have remained relatively flat for the last few years, even as the new AI capabilities have started proliferating into marketing technology systems. CMOs of major travel brands are being asked to produce more content and generate more leads than ever, and their teams aren’t getting any larger. They are being asked to deliver more personalized content, across more channels, for more segments, with the same resources they had last year.
Gartner projects that by 2027, 90% of CMOs will pilot AI agents to deliver personalized, adaptive customer experiences. For marketers and digital teams, AI is becoming capable enough to displace humans doing many of the repetitive execution jobs like tagging metadata, generating content variations, fixing broken links, or assembling QA screenshots. These mundane tasks can be handed off to agentic tools. This shift enables marketing teams to rise above the AI waterline to focus on higher-value work like journey architecture, experimentation design, and creative strategy.
Consider the complexity that a capable agentic content layer enables. A hotel group launching a campaign across six audience segments, three channels, and four regions used to face a content production bottleneck that limited personalization to the most valuable segments. With AI-assisted content production and an agentic content platform, that same team can serve distinctive, personalized experiences to all six segments simultaneously. Keeping content updated at that kind of scale would simply not be possible with traditional content operations.
The shape of a marketing team in the next few years will look meaningfully different than the last few, and that the teams redesigning their organizational systems today will have a significant head start.
Follow the series
This is the first in a travel and hospitality industry series on how AI is reshaping experience strategy. In upcoming posts, I’ll go deeper on each of the three themes introduced here, starting with a closer look at the emerging AI traveler journey and what’s changed in how travelers discover, compare, and book. From there, I’ll examine how generative search and GEO are disrupting the travel planning funnel, and finally the organizational implications as agentic tools raise the AI waterline for marketing teams.
Whether you work for a global hotel chain, a regional airline, a casino resort, a restaurant group, or an amusement park, the organizations that navigate these shifts thoughtfully will help define what the future of travel looks like.