Why isn't AI booking your next holiday?

I went to the Travel Marketing AI Summit in London this week.

I was getting under the skin of the travel industry and where they are with AI. It was expecting lots of excitement about agentic commerce (when AI researches and books your holiday end-to-end).

But the conversation in the room was that this is quite a long way off. It might never dominate the way we think it will. What is definitely in the room now is visibility in AI models.

Agentic booking.

Right now, AI is a research partner, not a decision maker. It can point you to a shortlist, hand you a URL, help at a small level with a booking. That's AI in the booking process today: small, referral level, not end to end.

Booking a holiday is so complex: itineraries, car hire, luggage, payments. Some people like the experience of booking and planning. Only 2% of leisure travellers are currently willing to give an AI agent full authority to book on their behalf, according to Skift.

This will grow. But travel remains a very personal, and in some cases enjoyable, experience. So I'm not sure how far it will go.

And nobody in the travel industry is panicking. They're used to unplanned problems, like the Iranian crisis, or new technology.

With our own customers, agentic booking is quite a long way off too. Instead they're focusing on AI tools for more day-to-day jobs to be more efficient, more productive, more personalised.

At the summit, Dara Brady, CMO from Ryanair described their business as sceptical towards AI (as most things :-)) but gradually rolling it out. It hasn't given them a huge benefit yet, and the focus is productivity, revenue and cost reduction, getting closer to hyper-personalisation.

Our customers are looking at things like the customer agent in HubSpot, which lets them handle customer queries by chat and email more effectively, so there's more time for quality conversations and engagement.

Visibility.

AI search is still referring a low level of bookings. Somebody in the room described the results from LLMs as mixed: traffic yes, referrals no.

And there's a black box around how the AI serves up its recommendations. With SEO we had Google Search Console. Now we don't know why the LLM chose a certain answer or source. And this is the fundamental discovery moment for the person choosing their holiday.

Someone from Google made the point that Google trained us to use keywords. Now we can be more human: say what we want, and it gives it to us. Google's figure is that 78% of people start their journey on Google. Then they go into the LLM loop to go deep, and come back to Google to close the loop.

Google also talked about new updates to AI Mode: tracking live flights, using loyalty miles, and checking out inside AI Mode. Checkout has since gone live, for hotels in the US (Skift, 27 August). Flights can be compared there but not booked yet, and the traveller still chooses and approves the booking.

Independent research shows search losing ground. Phocuswright found general search engines fell from 51% to 36% as the most-used travel research tool between mid-2024 and late 2025, while use of dedicated AI platforms like ChatGPT nearly tripled.

I find it exciting that Google doesn't remain the main gatekeeper. We've been reliant on Google search for so long.

Someone from Visit Britain raised the risk of homogeneity: an LLM might use a statistical model to recommend the places you're most likely to buy, rather than surfacing new places that might excite you. They've been working on their schema.org markup, and reported more citations and referrals from LLMs as a result.

Where to focus now.

Agentic booking will grow. But I'm not sure it will ever dominate the way we think. On the other hand getting found in LLMs, in the same way that travel firms try and get found in Google for SEO, is really important because travel is a very competitive market. By the way, HubSpot has an answer engine optimisation (AEO) feature that allows you to track your performance here and optimise to be found in LLMs. Comes to the tools around email marketing and segmentation, data cleanliness. Those are where AI can provide really tangible, quick results now for travel companies.

Do you think we could work together?

I help businesses grow through building intelligent and effective systems for go to market using HubSpot. If you think we can work together, please get in contact with me adam@bbdboom.com