In the first article in this series, I described three shifts reshaping travel and hospitality marketing. This piece goes one level deeper on the first of them: the new AI-influenced traveler whose decisions are shaped, and increasingly completed, inside AI conversations.
What questions are travelers asking AI?
Picture her planning a weeklong vacation in Costa Rica. A year ago she would have opened a dozen browser tabs. Instead she opens her AI assistant and explains what she’s looking for: warm weather, good surf for her husband, a lot of beach, and a midrange budget. She is mostly researching Jaco, a lively surf town on the Pacific coast. What comes back is more than the resorts she already knew about. AI surfaces a small boutique hotel tucked into the hills above the coastline, a romantic property with panoramic views over the ocean. The kind of place that would never appear on the first page of search engine results.
They decide to book two hotels instead of one, splitting the trip between the surfside beach resort and the hidden gem the AI uncovered.
The AI conducted the research a traveler used to do, and found something better. The question for that boutique hotel comes down to one thing: is your content structured so the new AI layer can find it, understand it, and factor it into the travel plans?
Call her the AI-influenced traveler. She isn’t defined by a device type or app like the mobile or connected traveler. She’s influenced by AI upstream during the decision-making process, within AI chat or agentic interactions, often before your brand has a say. The AI-influenced traveler has moved well past early adoption. Fifty-six percent of American travelers are now using AI to plan, book, or navigate their trips. That is a remarkably fast adoption curve, and unlike earlier platform shifts, most travel brands have yet to restructure their digital experiences around it.
The AI-influenced traveler is no longer an edge case. She's the default, and she is making decisions inside AI conversations, before your brand has a say.
This booking experience matches what I’m hearing from operators. Last year, Sitecore and Ogilvy One published a whitepaper I co-authored with Christopher Brewer, Who Really Has a Grasp on a Traveler's Journey, and we took its findings on a roundtable tour with marketing leaders across Sydney, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In rooms with brands like Mandarin Oriental, Cathay Pacific, Carnival Cruise Line, Crown Resorts, and Gardens by the Bay, the same theme surfaced in every city: generative AI and chat interfaces are reshaping how travelers research and book, faster than most teams have restructured to keep up.
What signals do AI engines use?
For decades, travel marketing leaders would meet to map out a clean, linear customer journey: inspiration, research & booking, check-in, on property, loyalty. Each stage had its own budget, tactics, and metrics. The SEO team worked to capture intent at the top. Retargeting tactics engaged the wanderers in the middle. Loyalty points accelerated the bottom of the funnel.
AI collapses the booking journey sequence into a single exchange. When a traveler asks AI to recommend a hotel in Dubai, the model synthesizes traveler reviews, price, location, and brand content to return a short answer, with no discrete "consideration phase" for a brand to win. The awareness and consideration stages where brands spent years competing on visibility and trust are compressing into an interaction the brand never sees.
This year, the compression started reaching the bottom of the funnel too. On Marriott's Q4 2025 earnings call, CEO Anthony Capuano announced the company is building a direct-booking integration with Google's AI Mode that will process reservations inside the AI rather than hand off a link. Hyatt launched a branded app inside ChatGPT and is rolling ChatGPT Enterprise across the company. These travelers describe what they want, see a handful of options, and book, sometimes without ever loading a brand website or searching through aggregated OTA (online travel agency) results.
Checkout in the chat
AI is part of your audience now. It reads everything before your guest does, and decides what reaches them.
At Google I/O in 2026, Google named hotel booking as a next focus for its agentic commerce, bringing booking inside AI conversations, end-to-end. A traveler can now describe a trip, compare options, and complete the purchase without leaving Search or Gemini. Two pieces make that work: a commerce protocol that turns the conversation into a checkout, and a payments protocol that lets them set a spending cap and preferred brands, then authorize an agent to book within those limits.
This introduces a big change for hotels and airlines because they don’t sell physical products with a SKU. A booking can be cancelled, modified, or repriced, and the final amount often isn't settled at checkout. As booking moves inside the conversation, the AI is no longer a search index pointing travelers to your site. It is simultaneously the consumer of your content and the editor of it, deciding in real time which properties to surface and which to leave out. In his CMS Critic article, Sitecore’s Scott Liewehr argues this editor ‘rewards the signal and incinerates the noise,’ prioritizing brands whose content is structured and specific, and skipping those with generic copy.
It’s time to stop building pages for your human guests to skim. Your brand content is an authoritative set of truths, rates, availability, and cancellation terms, for AI systems to repackage and serve to the next interested traveler. A brand on a modern, extensible platform can model and centralize brand content and publish once so it’s accurate wherever the traveler is searching. A brand stuck on legacy, disconnected systems cannot.
There is no page two
A search results page has a page two, page three, and endless scroll. AI answers do not. The AI-influenced traveler sees three to five options and picks one. If you are not in that list, there is no "below the fold."
This new paradigm creates a scarcity that’s colliding with collapsing web traffic dynamics. In a 2025 video interview, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince traced the trend through a single ratio of pages search and AI engines scrape versus visitors they send back:
- Google, a decade ago: 2:1, two pages scraped for every visitor sent back
- Google today: 18:1, the trade has gotten nine times worse
- AI assistants today: OpenAI at an estimated 1,500:1, Anthropic at 6,000:1
Follow these ratios to their natural conclusion and a site’s audience inverts to a mode where machines reading your content outnumber humans by such a wide margin that it influences the strategic objectives of your website.
That sounds like a loss, and for brands built entirely on buying top-of-funnel traffic, it might be. I’m already seeing strategic experience leaders in travel and hospitality who have turned the corner. They have stopped chasing clicks they can no longer depend on and prioritized ensuring their brand is the one the AI understands clearly enough to recommend. They are building toward a future where their brand content positions them as the authoritative answer, then converts the smaller, far more decided audience that answer sends them.
Fewer visitors, higher intent
There is some good news hiding beneath the disruption. Roughly half of travelers who use AI still click through to a source website, and the half that does is unlike any traffic you have ever bought, because they arrive primed to purchase, already half-sold. They click through to your site to confirm rather than browse: to review photos and check the dates or amenities, validating that the place the AI described is the one they want to book. The AI-influenced traveler may be the highest-intent audience travel marketing has ever had.
The brands pulling ahead are the ones prioritizing dynamic, engaging experiences for the guest who actually shows up. Qatar Airways had a familiar problem: returning loyalty members and first-time anonymous visitors saw the same generic destination content. Using Sitecore, they delivered personalized recommendations across web, email, and push, surfacing routes a member could redeem against their Qmiles balance. The result was a 26% conversion uplift on web and roughly $6 million in new annual revenue. Another example is Scenic, the ultra-luxury cruise line, which used Sitecore to surface places most travelers have never heard of, turning discovery into part of the experience and lifting site visits 42%. Both brands used technology to create dynamic and engaging experiences, and deliver their guest something contextually relevant enough to earn the booking.
The brands with a high level of agentic experience maturity www.sitecore.com/axa treat the AI citation as the start of the journey, not the end of it. The work can be split into two parts. The first is getting found, earning the citation in the first place, which rewards content an AI can read, trust, and present as the answer. Structure is table stakes; authority and substance win the citation. What good looks like depends on your business goals:
- Airlines: route, fare, and loyalty details structured so an assistant presents them accurately
- Restaurant groups: experience-rich content that answers specific questions, such as "where should I eat near the French Quarter?"
- Airports: terminal maps, contextual wayfinding, lounge wait times, and connection guidance
- Casinos: show lineups and dining structured so the model recommends a specific night out, not a generic "Vegas weekend"
- Rail: schedules and scenic-corridor detail published as structured data
The second half is converting the site visitor that AI refers by holding the pre-arrival moment as a designed experience, and meeting high-intent travelers with something personal enough to turn a recommendation into a reservation.
Trust is the window, and it is closing
This only resolves cleanly if travelers trust the AI doing the recommending, and today only about 46% say they do. That number will continue to climb, and the gap is the opportunity. When a traveler already trusts United Airlines, or an established luxury resort like The Peninsula Hotels, then sees an AI recommend it, the brand lends credibility. For now, trust is flowing directionally from brand to model. Established brands with genuine authority, and the structured, factual content to back it up, have generated a genuine advantage in becoming the answer AI delivers, but that window won't stay open forever.
How to optimize travel content for AI
The travel planning funnel you knew isn't coming back, and the AI-influenced traveler is the new normal. This creates an opportunity because fewer visitors with far higher intent, arriving because an AI referred you, is a better proposition than spray-and-pray content marketing ever was. Now you need to deliver intelligent experiences that drive measurable growth, delivered at a speed unmatched by your old content operations.
No digital team can hand-build citable, structured, personalized content for every destination a traveler searches. This is where the platform truly matters. SitecoreAI accelerates human creativity safely, giving teams speed and control in one governed system across content management, digital asset management, and personalization. It can learn from brand values and human edits, so rework drops and approvals speed up at lower risk, with people still at the controls building brand experiences.
There’s work to do to stay ahead. Structure your content so an AI system can read it, trust it, and cite it as the answer. Centralize assets so publishing once syndicates across channels to appear accurately everywhere a traveler visits. Prioritize the pre-arrival experience, the stretch between booking and arrival, as a brand experience, not a handoff between teams or systems.
Somewhere in the hills above Jaco, a boutique hotel earned a booking it would never have won in the old funnel model, because its content was structured to be found. That is the game now: become the answer an AI system wants to cite, and then meet the traveler who clicks through with an experience worthy of recommendation. As the booking journey compresses, new opportunities emerge.
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Assess your readiness with Sitecore's Agentic Experience Assessment (AXA)
This is the second article in the series. Next, I'll look at what AI is doing inside the marketing team itself: how AI-powered content operations are reshaping how teams work, letting them move at a speed and scale that wasn't possible a year ago, while keeping the human-in-the-loop judgment that makes hospitality feel human.