"It's one of those times, as leader of a
business, when you rely on your gut as much as or more than your
intellect," Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert said during November's
Phocuswright Conference,
Speaking at the same conference, Spotnana CEO and Madrona
Venture Group managing director Steve Singh highlighted three areas that will
see major transformation over the next five years: how travel is searched, how
content is distributed and how travel is serviced, with AI driving change
across all three of those areas.
"Agentic AI is going to touch it all: the sourcing, the
customer experience, the messaging the booking, the individual traveler, the
data," GoldSpring Consulting partner Will Tate said. "It's going to
weave its way through the entire ecosystem in a way that's just beginning, so
to be thinking about that as you move into the next five years is
critical."
With search, Singh said ways to search for travel will
"expand materially" over the next five years, with conversational AI
playing a growing role. Ekert made a similar prediction, saying agentic AI will
"evolve fundamentally as a new channel" for booking. Who the players
will be in that evolution is still not clear.
Ekert said his own leadership teams are spending about 40
percent of their weekly meetings on the topic of agentic AI.
"I don't know what that prize is, but it's large,"
he said. "The idea is we're going to play there, and we're going to play
aggressively. I don't know whether that's going to be 5 percent or 50 percent
of the market in five years, but it will be material." Sabre announced a major
investment in and partnership with AI
travel platform BizTrip earlier this month.
Ekert noted that the agentic AI players in the market
"want to own the consumer experience from front to back."
OTAs, meanwhile, are seeing a new opportunity to move away
from reliance on search engines to drive their traffic and build on their own
relationships with customers.
"You'll see us releasing more and more features,"
Omri Morgenshtern, CEO of OTA Agoda, said. "I'm certain the five to seven
years from now, or maybe two to three years from now, the user experience will
be very different, and a lot of it will be led by OTAs."
Radical Booking & Servicing Changes
Corporate travel managers, meanwhile, are facing an industry
upheaval similar to when online booking first hit the scene, said travel
technologist Norm Rose, whose Travel Tech Consulting was
recently acquired by GoldSpring Consulting in order to help its consultants
prepare buyers for this sea change. As with the advent of online booking, some
buyers will be early adopters, but ultimately, the current self-booking model
is going "to take a backseat" as the AI models evolve, he said.
"The vision of simply being in a calendar, creating an
appointment and having all the agentic software going out and, based on your
preferences and corporate policies, making a booking, that still is a few years
off," Rose said. "What's going to happen in between is a lot of
confusion."
That is transforming the distribution side as well, as
"every provider wants to have as close to a direct relationship as
possible," Singh said. Ekert said there will be "disintermediation of
every channel" and shifting control of distribution, with some current
direct bookings moving into the agentic AI workspace.
Ekert also predicted "exponential growth" in New
Distribution Capability bookings going forward as agencies continue to make the
necessary changes to ensure they can adopt without degrading user experience or
efficiency. AI can help automate some of that work, he said.
"The industry did not work in a collaborative fashion
as it is now working, so I think you're going to see change happen at a much
more rapid pace going forward," Ekert said.
Singh also predicted that TMCs would "evolve
radically" and that within "five years, tops," travelers would
have their own "agentic travel agent for life." Amadeus SVP of
solution consulting Robert Buckman said solving for travel disruption would be
"the next big leap forward," citing technology
such as Acai, in which Amadeus is an investor.
He added that Amadeus was working on several pilot programs
using model context protocol—in which AI models can connect with external tools
and services—including a voice-activated agent. It is able to respond to
natural language and make changes to records in real time, even in multiple
languages, he said.
"An engineer who was bilingual switched to French, and
the AI agent didn't miss a beat," Buckman said.
No Single Winners with Agentic AI Experience
Singh said that meeting corporate needs will actually
"be easier" in the near future, with policies able to be adjusted in
real-time and spending and purchasing patterns easier to identify. The
complexity, he said, will come in meeting travelers where they are.
"There's not one interface; there could be five or six
interfaces in one trip," Singh said. "How you deliver that seamless
experience is the hard part. If you think about what causes a poor trip
experience, it's that most systems don't talk to one another."
Buckman said for that reason, collaboration is what will
drive value creation going forward. "No one company or entity will unlock
that seamless travel experience," he said.