The Golden Age of Travel Is Back — and AI will Power It

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For decades, language has remained one of the final obstacles to truly immersive travel. Although low-cost airlines and online booking platforms have made the world more accessible than ever, most English travellers, because we are notoriously language-lazy, still experience foreign countries through a filter, relying on guidebooks, pre-translated menus, or the ability to speak louder in English to make the locals understand us.

That barrier is now beginning to dissolve.

Google’s newly announced real-time translation experience, which delivers live translations directly through everyday headphones, offers a glimpse into a future where understanding your surroundings abroad becomes effortless, immediate, and human.

When combined with emerging wearable devices like Meta’s smart glasses, AI translation is poised to fundamentally reshape how people explore the world, as not only will we be able to hear foreign language in English, the same glasses will capture our English replies and project them from our phone’s speakers in the local language so that whoever we are chatting with can understand what we are saying back.

At the moment, the tech is just in its infancy, but the rate of progress is jaw-dropping

From “Getting By” to Truly Understanding

Most travellers have experienced the quiet anxiety of not understanding what’s being said around them. Is that announcement important? Is the waiter explaining something I should know? Am I missing cultural nuance?

Google’s beta feature turns any pair of headphones into a real-time, one-way translation device. Crucially, by preserving tone, emphasis, and cadence, the technology doesn’t just translate words; it conveys meaning. You hear how something is said, not just what is said.

This is a major shift enabled by AI. Language is emotional and contextual. Sarcasm, warmth, urgency, and humour are often lost in traditional translation apps that rely on text or robotic audio. By maintaining vocal nuance, AI translation allows travellers to follow conversations more naturally and confidently, even when they don’t speak the local language.

The result isn’t just convenience; it’s inclusion.

The Rise of “Invisible” Translation

The real breakthrough isn’t translation itself, it’s where translation now lives.

Instead of pulling out a phone, typing phrases, or awkwardly holding a screen between two people, translation is moving into wearables: headphones today, smart glasses tomorrow. This makes language support ambient and almost invisible.

Imagine walking through a local market in Tokyo, hearing stallholders’ calls translated softly in your ears. Or inter-railing around Europe, understanding announcements in real time without scanning for English signage. Or attending a local festival, lecture, or guided tour while abroad, fully present, without constantly switching between listening and translating.

When paired with smart glasses, this experience could extend even further: subtitles appearing discreetly in your field of view, translated street signs, or contextual explanations layered onto the physical world.

Travel becomes less about decoding and more about experiencing.

Empowering More People to Travel Confidently

One of the most positive impacts of AI translation tools is who they empower.

For older travellers, solo travellers, or those who feel intimidated by unfamiliar languages, these tools reduce friction and fear. You no longer need to “know enough” of a language to feel safe or capable. That confidence alone can open up destinations that previously felt inaccessible.

And for families travelling together, AI translation becomes a shared safety net, allowing children, parents, and grandparents alike to engage more fully with the world around them.

Cultural Curiosity, Not Cultural Replacement

A common concern with translation technology is that it may discourage people from learning languages. In reality, the opposite is already happening.

Google’s expansion of its language-learning tools, enhanced with Gemini’s ability to understand idioms, slang, and cultural context, shows how translation and learning can reinforce each other. When travellers hear accurate, contextual translations in real-world settings, language becomes less abstract and more alive.

Hearing that “stealing my thunder” isn’t about theft, but about overshadowing someone, teaches culture as much as vocabulary. These moments spark curiosity, not complacency.

AI translation doesn’t replace cultural effort; it lowers the barrier to entry.

Could this launch a new Golden Age of Travel?

Google’s rollout remains in its early stages and is limited to certain countries and devices, but the trend is evident. AI translation is progressing from a basic tool to a travel companion, empowering holidaymakers to explore distant destinations with greater confidence and travel more frequently. Many will become “digital nomads”, using Zoom and other platforms to work while experiencing different cultures and warm climates around the world.

The social and economic impact of AI, which continues to advance rapidly, remains very concerning, with 20% unemployment expected within five years and a high probability that the rich will get richer while the poor get poorer. However, there is nearly 100% agreement among experts that we will all have more leisure time, with a four-day workweek likely.

Combine this extra time with the ability to travel freely because language barriers have been removed, and you can understand my profound hope that we are actually standing at the dawn of the Golden Age of Travel.

Agentic AI in the Browser: A Time-Saver or a Google stranglehold over travel.

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Agentic AI is rapidly moving from theory to practice. Instead of merely answering questions, these systems can now act on a user’s behalf by booking flights, comparing prices, filling out forms, or making purchases, which will significantly impact how travel products are booked.

The ease of use will allow users to bypass both travel agents and OTA sites to purchase non-ATOL bonded packages curated by Google, with Agentic AI guiding them through the complex booking process in minutes using pre-stored booking preferences and credit card details.

Google’s recent explanation of how Chrome will secure its upcoming agentic AI features provides a glimpse into how this future might operate at scale.

At first glance, the consumer benefits appear convincing and provide initial steps toward creating the “Digital Shopping Twin” that I have long forecast will alleviate much of the shopping hassle for users.

Travellers who are accustomed to navigating an average of 72 sites before booking their holidays to compare prices and read reviews often experience tab overload, decision fatigue, and repetitive online tasks. Agentic AI offers a form of digital delegation. However, as these agents become integrated into browsers, arguably the most commercially significant layer of the internet, because they control product access, crucial questions around trust, control, and commercial neutrality arise, as let’s be honest, Google don’t have a good track record here.

Google’s approach to agentic security is sophisticated, layered, and thoughtfully designed. Yet it also highlights a deeper tension: when the same company that controls the browser, the AI model, the ad ecosystem, and the marketplace is acting “on your behalf,” how confident can users be that convenience won’t quietly blur into influence based on who pays Google the most?

Why Google Agentic AI is a major threat to the UK Travel Trade.

The promise of agentic AI lies in time compression. Tasks that currently require dozens of micro-decisions: searching, filtering, logging in, and comparing options, can be reduced to a single voice instruction. “Book me the best-value Flight ticket from Manchester in May 2026 to Majorca for a 7-night duration, combined with the best-reviewed 4-star hotel costing less than £200 per night on a bed and breakfast basis in Alcudia with a private taxi transfer from the airport”.

In terms of productivity, this is transformative. For less tech-confident users, it could also be empowering, reducing cognitive and technical barriers to booking holidays online and posing a significant threat to the traditional role of travel agents and OTAs.

Forget hallucinations and silly errors: Google’s Architecture prevents these.

Google’s outlined safeguards demonstrate a strong understanding of the risk of AI hallucinations and mistakes. Central to this is a multi-model oversight system in which one AI plans actions, and another, called the User Alignment Critic and powered by Gemini, assesses whether those actions genuinely align with the user’s stated goal.

This separation is important. It mirrors patterns found in safety-critical systems, where execution and oversight are purposely separated, reducing the likelihood that Google Travel tools will mistakenly book incorrect items or fail even if the rest of the travel industry hopes they will and jump on any mistake to harangue them or disparage the reputation of AI Tools.

Equally important are Agent Origin Sets, which clearly define where an agent can read data and where it can act. Read-only zones may enable price comparisons on a travel site, whereas read-write zones limit interactions to authorised buttons or form fields and prevent items from being booked without explicit user approval.

Layered on top are URL monitoring systems to prevent unsafe navigation, the explicit requirement of user consent for sensitive actions such as payments and strict separation of password data. In short, Chrome’s agentic AI is not given free rein; it operates within a tightly constrained sandbox when processing customer travel requests.

The Big Risk: Commercial Bias Driven by Convenience

However, security is only part of the story. The more complex issue is alignment, not just with user intent regarding which holidays they prefer, but also with user interests in finding the best value provider, not merely the one suggested by Google because of the highest commission.

Most travellers still do not realise that the top of the Google search page is not dominated by the best providers but by those willing to pay the highest click costs to attract customers to their sites.

Google is in a unique and dominant position. Chrome manages access to the web. Gemini interprets intent. Google Shopping, Ads, Flights, and Search already facilitate commercial discovery. When a Google AI Travel Agent chooses which product to buy, which option is “best,” or which site is trustworthy, those choices are clearly influenced by Google’s commercial interests rather than the customers.

Even if no explicit manipulation occurs, defaults matter. Ranking logic matters. Training data matters. Over time, an agent that consistently chooses Google-affiliated services, preferred partners, or ad-optimised outcomes could quietly reshape user behaviour without users’ knowledge.

Unlike search results, which users can scan and override, agentic decisions are made on the user’s behalf. That efficiency and time saving are the key drivers, but it also reduces visibility.

A Powerful Tool That Demands Ongoing Scrutiny

Agentic AI in Chrome could save users significant time and mental effort when booking a holiday, and, bluntly, it’s tough luck for the travel industry if it replaces some of our jobs. However, although Google has discussed at length its technical safeguards, it remains silent on the clear ethical conflict of potentially recommending not the best travel options for customers, but those that generate the most revenue for Google.

It also triggers the age-old ATOL debate. Why should dynamically packaging retailers bear the substantial burden of “Principal” status when Google can offer precisely the same services without any bonding?

Both the UK Government as a whole and the Civil Aviation Authority must thoroughly examine Google’s plans for Agentic AI in travel and determine whether these constitute responsible activity or an abuse of a dominant market position.

To be entirely clear, I support customers’ right to choose, and using AI in the travel booking process will make holiday arrangements much simpler, but transparency of recommendations needs to be a legal requirement imposed on Google ASAP.

The Travel Sector Shake-Up: Who Survives the AI Storm?

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At the recent AITO conference, I was asked the intriguing question of “Which Travel Sector is most threatened by the rollout of AI?”

Honestly, it’s easier to flip this question and look at what protections the travel industry has against AI. For example, “Asset” holders like airlines, cruise lines, and hotels aren’t threatened just because customers will always need them, and they can’t be “disintermediated”. Therefore, companies such as Tui, Easyjet, and Jet2 Holidays are likely to see AI as a way to improve efficiency and will use it to open new distribution routes.

However, “Online Travel Agents” (OTAs) face two significant and imminent threats.

Over the past 20 years, Google has dominated holiday search, and its algorithms, which reward higher click volumes with lower average costs, have established a fairly “locked-in” hierarchy primarily shared among Love Holidays, On the Beach, and booking.com for most holiday search terms. This is now being seriously disrupted by the introduction of Google AI search mode powered by Gemini, which has taken 30-40% of the traffic that used to flow to the top-positioned advertisers and redistributed it in a completely different way based on the best match to a customer’s request.

This trend is only going to be exacerbated as competing AI search tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity rapidly increase their market share in the UK.

At the same time, Gemini and the other LLM (Large Language Model) search engines are all launching “Agentic AI” solutions for travel. These enable customers to either type or use voice activation to make complex, detailed travel requests, which then open new windows with the “Agentic AI Agent,” which mimics a human and uses relevant travel sites like Skyscanner to identify the best flight options before combining them with hotel options from booking.com.

This new age “Dynamic Packaging” avoids the extensive costs and restrictions of ATOL bonding and therefore offers customers lower cost options, threatening to undermine the OTA’s core offering of range and lowest price.

Some customers will still seek “Principal Status” and ATOL protection, but I doubt this will be the majority, which puts Love and OTB’s market share at real risk. However, nobody should ever dismiss this innovative business, as they could simply pivot to using AI to develop their offering while leveraging their established brand recognition.

Travel Agents also face a significant threat, but ironically, it’s not from being replaced by AI but from more agents joining the hunt for customers and “Super Agents” hoovering up a much larger share of the market.

We have already seen 37,000 agents join the sector under the umbrella of “IntelleTravel”, but this figure is set to rise dramatically as “Agentic AI” tools mean nearly anyone can book travel with minimal training. Add to this the extensive product knowledge available at their fingertips from AI tools, and the “Agency” battle shifts to how cost-effectively agents can attract customers and on what scale.

I believe there will be a new wave of “Influencer agents” using TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to promote inspiring destination content, generating leads that they then either pass on to third-party price-comparison sites or book themselves using agentic AI tools.

Even within traditional homeworking channels, top sellers can grow even faster by delegating all their back-office booking and research tasks to AI, while using their freed-up time to leverage their human sales skills to handle 2-3 times more customers per year. These “Super Agents” will logically gain increased market share, forcing weaker agents to go part-time or leave the sector.

It will also be fascinating to see what new travel brands are created using the new “Model Context Protocol” (MCP) technology. MCP is a simple standardisation wrapper that LLMs are forcing suppliers to put around their API feeds to turn them into “Standardised Bricks” accessible by AI coding teams to create new “Travel Super Stores”.

Using MCP tools from suppliers significantly simplifies the creation of price-comparison sites and innovative packaging tools, such as “Event Trip,” a new spin-out soon to be launched by Neural River Incubator.

The established travel order is set for a significant shake-up, not in the next 10 years as some commentators predict, but rather within the next 2 years, in my opinion, as the wave of AI change is now accelerating rapidly, with even the slow-moving travel sector beginning to engage first gear.

Trust is a Specialist’s Superpower in an AI World.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the AITO conference in the beautiful region of Asturias, Northern Spain. My role was to act as a catalyst for a debate about how AI will impact specialist tour operators and how businesses should start implementing AI into their operations.

My core message was that, because travel is a high-value transaction based on a promise to deliver a product at a future date, “Trust” in them as humans or in their company’s brand is their key defence against AI disintermediation, where customers go to “Destination Management Companies” (DMCs) and organise their own itineraries using the knowledge of the internet.

Some individuals argued that their expertise was vastly superior to that of the internet and that AI was prone to “Hallucinations” that could lead to disastrous outcomes. To some extent, I think they have a point, but I reminded them that AI is currently just a “one-year-old child” and that they should be prepared for the rapid progress approaching. I believe it is unlikely that their agents will know about every restaurant, bar, and attraction, or the full details of every possible hotel choice, whereas AI already does.

I advised that they should continue to keep all sales contacts “Human”- facing, as I believe humans prefer buying from humans, but empower their agents behind the scenes with as much AI knowledge and tools as possible so they can continue to know more than their customers.

For example, why not have AI listen to all customer calls and automatically prompt agents on their screens with information they might want to discuss with the customer, or send via WhatsApp or email, using professionally generated content and PDFs with full quotes for the itinerary and pricing.

I also demonstrated how they could extend their interactions with customers by using Travel Voice’s “AI Reps” to manage pre-departure customer service and in-resort information flow when they lacked on-the-ground human representatives. These AI reps use a “Cloned” voice of the agent who handled the initial sale to provide continuity of interaction.

Some operators recognised the advantages of this but wisely expressed a desire to test these tools gradually on a subset of customers so they could “Test and Learn” without risking lasting damage to their brands or reputations. This is always a sound strategy when implementing AI.

However, nearly all the operators I spoke to like the idea of using AI Review Agents, pre-programmed with detailed knowledge of a customer’s itinerary and weather during their stay, to have a “Chat” with the customer upon their return. They encourage customers strongly to upload holiday photos and videos. Our extensive testing already shows that this leads to much more detailed user content being captured, which AI can then use to generate reviews for Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, etc., to be posted by customers. These reviews are automatically seeded with the agent’s name and company details, creating a “Digital Word of Mouth” within trusted sites that power most “Large Language Models” (LLMs) responses to customer searches.

This same content can also be used on the operator’s website and added to their CRMS so that they know not just what holidays customers took last time but what they enjoyed doing during those holidays.

None of these tools replaces humans, as they mainly perform functions that the business currently misses due to scalability or resource cost restrictions, thereby logically increasing business stickiness and repeat booking levels.

Most businesses expressed the opinion that they need to embrace AI as a back-office tool to increase efficiency and allow their staff to focus on the human-facing sales functions, but few had a definitive plan and found the vast array of AI tools daunting.

My advice is simple. If you want to implement AI successfully, the project must be led by the business owner or leader and cannot just be delegated to the IT or marketing departments. It is also advisable to bring in “External Advisors” to demonstrate the “Art of the possible” in a morning session and then guide a business team comprising both senior managers and internal young AI advocates in identifying the 5-10 things the business could do immediately.

This should then be reduced to a maximum of 5 projects to ensure the initial focus is maintained and that these first experiments in “Test and Learn” succeed, allowing the AI rollout to get off to a positive start and creating a virtuous cycle of efficiency gains.

This blog is not an advert, but if anybody does want some low-cost AI Advice, contact me, and I’ll put you in touch with Neural River, the AI Consultancy business that I have invested in as a Chair.

Biggest impact of AI in Travel? Anybody can be a travel agent.

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Although I am a strong advocate of AI tools in travel, I believe it will mainly serve as a co-pilot to human sales agents, as buying travel either requires a “Trusted” online brand or the trust built through a human sales interaction. After all, how many other products cost you £2,400 on average, and you only get a promise to deliver at a date often 6 months or more in advance?

Therefore, the primary threat AI tools pose to travel agents is that they allow nearly anyone to become one, leading me to predict a massive wave of new entrant travel agents working from home, part-time or full-time, over the next five years.

Many traditional consortia openly mocked Intelli Travel when it entered the UK market, offering an ultra-low entry point: you pay your money and get access to their platforms, commission, and personal holiday deals, with only a basic level of training required.

However, after signing up 37,000 agents, they are now recognised as a force to be reckoned with, even though some operators still complain about the number of calls they generate and feel that most deliver very few bookings and are only agents to obtain discounts on friends-and-family bookings.

AI Co-pilots will swiftly automate the booking process with tools like my own www.anybetter.com, enabling agents to compare all offers for a specific hotel from leading providers, including optional extras like baggage and transfers, to achieve an accurate final price comparison before booking.

Rather than relying on API feeds that only supply leading prices, this and similar systems use Agentic AI to script through sites to both retrieve pricing information and to deliver a customer to the final checkout page having used their profile information to complete all the required names, ages and address fields, along with the already expressed preferences in terms of baggage, seat selection and transfers.

AI tools also give agents access to the entire knowledge base of the internet about any hotel or destination in the world, so having been on multiple fam trips becomes less of a useful skill and more just a perk of the trade.

This means the primary skill for a travel agent will be generating leads, which is why we will see a wave of agents with million-pound turnovers, who are TikTok or Meta influencers, producing their own content and turning followers into customers.

We are already seeing leading social media players, such as Social Trinity and Trending Travel, enlisting influencers to license their content for lead-generation campaigns with partner tour operators, destinations, or hotel chains. How long before they form their own consortia and license booking technology?

Good agents need not worry, as the same AI tools will help them become even more productive by freeing up their time to focus on where the human agent truly adds the most value: talking to customers to fully understand all their needs and building trust, the basis of both conversion and repeat bookings.

AI-driven businesses like Travel Voice can even clone agents’ voices to assist customers while they are already on the phone or relaxing on the sofa with a glass of wine out of hours. This same voice can then power a personalised Travel Rep that accompanies customers on their phones to manage all their in-destination needs, such as recommending bars and restaurants, arranging taxis and excursions, and more. To be blunt, the agents themselves can never do this, so using AI can actually build trust and further enhance the customer-agent relationship.

Although many in the travel sector still dismiss AI as over hyped and claim that their customers still want the personal touch, smarter players are working out how to deploy AI to slicken up their operations and take a step ahead.

Take an honest look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Which one am I?”

Travel Republic: The Death of DP or just Corporate Strangulation?

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he announcement that the DNATA group is to close Travel Republic, hot on the heels of On the Beach’s closure of its “Dynamically Packaging” (DP) trade arm, makes it feel like the end of the era for independent DP in the UK.

Having been deeply involved with the Dynamic Packaging sector since its inception, as a founder of On Holiday Group alongside partners Bill Allen (On the Beach) and Brian Young (G Adventures). I spent many enjoyable hours in Kingston pubs with Travel Republic’s founders, discussing strategy and exit options!

Unfortunately, On Holiday Groups’ VAT dispute with HMRC halted merger talks, and the guys became wealthy young men when selling out to DNATA on 28 December 2011, which now appears to be the business’s peak. At this point, they were serving more than 2 million customers annually and had seen their turnover rise by over 40% to more than £400 million in 2011, making them the clear OTA leader at that time.

Sensibly, DNATA tied the leadership of the business, Kane Pirie and Paul Furner, to the company through deferred payments for a further 3 years. However, the business never prospered the same way again, and like many acquisitions, as it lost its entrepreneurial drive and quick decision-making.

Only DNATA insiders will understand how, from these lofty heights, Travel Republic ended up licensed for fewer than 150,000 passengers in 2025, dropping out of the top 20 ATOL holders for the first time in 20 years.

However, I point to three key factors.

Ryanair: No Dynamic Packaging Business can survive without it.

The massive disruption caused by Covid-19 and Ryanair’s outrageous behaviour towards OTAs led to a legal battle between Ryanair and DNATA, after which Travel Republic removed Ryanair from sale for 4 years, from 2021 to May 2025.

Cheap seat access is vital for any DP engine. While competitors On the Beach and Love Holidays endeavoured to find workarounds to keep selling Ryanair during their openly declared war on UK OTAs, DNATA made the frankly arrogant decision that it did not need them. In my opinion, this move effectively destroyed Travel Republic as a competitive force.

I feel free to say this in hindsight, as I openly expressed it to the DNATA management at the time and felt great sympathy for the team, which did not have the power to overturn a decision made at the highest levels of the owner, Emirates.

Ryanair is the lowest-cost flight provider and is estimated to account for approximately 60% of both Love’s and On the Beach’s flight seats, with both businesses booming again after the Ryanair trade reconciliation.

High EasyJet API fees, squeezing OTA profits, and reducing access to Jet2 seats through its in-house tour operations have made Ryanair access essential, and not doing so has strangled Travel Republic, forcing it to reposition itself as a Dubai- and long-haul-focused operation.

The COVID-19 Google Algorithm Reset.

OTAs in general survived COVID-19 much better than integrated tour operators like Tui, specifically because they had a much more flexible model with no plans sat on the ground and no guaranteed or owned hotels sitting empty.

However, COVID-19 disrupted the hierarchy of Google visibility that protected the top three players’ traffic volumes. The Google history algorithm essentially means you pay less to be in the number one search position if you have been there for the last six months, which effectively blocks new entrants who have to fight their way to the top at great cost (a key reason why Low-Cost Holidays failed).

This created a relatively fixed and unchanging access to customers that existed before Covid-19, protecting relative volumes. However, the shutdown wiped out this history, turning it into a race among the major players to reestablish the pecking order once the bounce-back began.

As a privately held company, Love Holidays was able to be much more aggressive than On the Beach and Travel Republic, gaining a massive market-share boost post-COVID-19. This caused Travel Republic to spiral into consistent losses, which ultimately led to its demise.

Corporate Strangulation.

I am unusual in that I had a successful Corporate Career, rising to Deputy Chief Operating Officer of MyTravel, running all its UK business in 2003, before becoming the rogue Entrepreneur of my later career.

This provides me with insight into how corporate cultures have repeatedly undermined and dismantled nearly every acquisition made in travel.

People are central to every travel business because the most successful ones consistently focus on customers and brands, taking great pride in the businesses they have built.

Every time things get tough, the corporate accountants start seeking cost savings by merging IT, finance, and customer services across the business, which destroys this focus.

With Travel Republic, DNATA immediately expanded its use of technology across other parts of its business, shifting attention away from its UK operations, and further damaged it by incorporating its hotel-buying team into group roles to help establish a corporate-wide bed bank called Yalago.

I am sure these seemed sensible corporate decisions at the time. Still, inevitably, they damaged the Travel Republic operation, and when combined with remote, disconnected discussions about Ryanair, they ultimately put the business into a downward spiral from which it has never recovered.

Summary

I know many clever and resilient people who have worked at Travel Republic and other DNATA-owned businesses over the years, and most have enjoyed working for this generous and considerate organisation.

However, I really don’t think Travel Republic marks the end of the Dynamic Packaging era; it’s simply a natural shift, caused by the currents of disruption that have hit the UK industry over the last 10 years. Smaller, more tightly managed businesses can react and change direction more quickly to survive these issues.

I clearly don’t know the full story here, but I hope my analysis, written at 4 am from the Dominican Republic, offers some insights and demonstrates how much I care about the topic.

Forget Expedia — AI Just Became the World’s Biggest Travel Agent

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Having been around long enough to witness the birth of the internet and the impact of the migration to mobile on search, it’s fascinating to observe the beginning of the evolution towards AI Search.

Marriott published research this week indicating that the proportion of travellers using AI has risen to 50% from 41% last year and 26% in 2023, nearly doubling in just two years. Unsurprisingly, younger generations are adopting it more rapidly, but even my age group, 55-64-year-olds, shows a 29% usage rate.

In recent blogs, I have promoted the use of MCP standardisation API wrappers as a vital step towards enabling large language models like ChatGPT to ingest live pricing and availability data from travel businesses. Last week, the launch of integrations with Booking.com and Expedia was announced, allowing travellers to search for hotels using natural language queries such as “Find me a private house with four separate bedrooms near top golf courses in Austin, Texas, for less than £300 per night.”

This would have saved me the trouble of switching between Airbnb, Booking, and ChatGPT when planning the trip I’m currently on, though I’m still redirected to these sites to make the actual bookings. This will be the next pain point to be eliminated, with ChatGPT soon becoming a merchant of record and an even bigger player than Amazon, selling millions of products. However, most of these will still come from Amazon, given its clever vertical integration that has made it a key physical distribution player.

I have also been predicting the development of “Digital Twins” that enable us to build a detailed profile of our personal preferences and update it daily by monitoring all our purchases. Retailers like Amazon already use these AI tools to personalise the offers they present to you, and Google even monitors our conversations to inform their recommendation engines.

The most logical place for a “Digital Twin” is on a user’s phone, so hardware manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have a natural advantage in this race. That’s why, at the start of 2025, OpenAI signed a major strategic alliance with them to exploit this opportunity jointly, and all LLMs are partnering with the hardware required to deliver AI tools.

Wearable tech will also play a significant role in how we use AI going forward, with Meta teaming up with Ray-Ban and Google launching the Android XR glasses. These devices connect to your phone but offer extra utility by being hands-free: they function as headphones that use vibration technology in the glasses’ arms, and as listening devices with microphones positioned just above your mouth.

Most importantly, they can serve as a second set of eyes, relaying what you see and offering instant classification, research, or instructions directly on the lenses. I already use these when travelling to discreetly and instantly translate different languages into my ears, although it hasn’t improved my ability to respond yet, as I still need the Google Translate function on my phone to speak the language.  But I’m told this is coming fast.

However, it’s the shopping function offered by these glasses that I’m really looking forward to!

Imagine that, instead of browsing retail clothing stores, you can look at a stylish outfit someone else is wearing and immediately see where to buy it online at what price, with your digital twin instantly showing all your sizes and colour preferences.

This may sound like fiction, but it will be part of our everyday lives within the next 5 years, so we need to start thinking about how these forms of AI will affect the travel ecosystem.

The only businesses protected from AI disintermediation are the travel asset holders—airlines, hotels, and ground transportation —while the rest of the market faces significant disruption.

Logic suggests that major travel companies like Booking and Expedia will grow even larger as they can gather more content while leading AI distribution through partnerships with large language models.

However, with the removal of language barriers, travellers are likely to become more adventurous, seeking unique and authentic experiences best provided by niche specialist businesses, which become more findable with AI search tools, so there will still be a place for the specialists.

I also expect “Event” based travel to boom, which is why I am investing in an MCP-based AI startup aiming to create the ultimate itineraries for Event travel.

The simplification of the travel booking process is also likely to create a new breed of Influencer “Travel Agents”, promoting destinations and specific trips via TikTok shops or Instagram, using their own authentic content creation. So again, I’m investing in this space.

I have always loved disruption, and this is likely to be the fastest and biggest change we have ever seen in the travel sector.

Is your business ready?

Dear Travel Brands: Stop Optimising for Humans – Start Optimising for AI

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At today’s TransPerfect conference, we again heard that content is king, and in a world where customers visit websites, I could not agree more.

Good imagery and well-written, insightful content are essential for transforming Google-generated PPC clicks into bookings, but will this stay the same in a world dominated by AI Search?

All commentators predict that the arrival of MCP Servers, which enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to have agentic front ends that connect to thousands of suppliers to retrieve prices and availability, will mean that customers’ research will be conducted within the large language models themselves. Customers will no longer need to click out to suppliers’ websites to make bookings. Instead, it will act like Amazon, taking payments from customers or, to avoid ATOL package holiday regulations, use the customers’ payment details to either make component bookings via an MCP connection with suppliers or make one booking with an ATOL-bonded provider.

This evolution reminds me of the changes my own “On Holiday Group” (OHG) experienced during the “Dynamic Packaging” revolution that transformed the travel industry in the early 2000s.

Initially, we believed that the quality of our hotel images, descriptions, and video content would persuade travel businesses to use our website to book accommodation over our competitors. However, as the “Online Travel Agents” (OTAs) grew in size, our distribution rapidly shifted from human agents using our site to OTAs accessing our content and pricing via APIs (now replaced by MCPs).

These OTAs sourced the best content from suppliers like OHG, but then linked all suppliers’ prices to this content, and allocated bookings to the cheapest supplier.

So, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Large Language Models are likely to do the same. Therefore, what’s the point in investing in good hotel or resort content if it’s not going to be seen by your customers?

Neural River, my MCP consultancy, is instead advising travel companies on which “differentiators” besides content are likely to influence “Digital LLM” visitors, based on the assumption that their human users are unlikely to leave the AI Search engine to visit your site in future.

The core idea of AI Search is that it helps customers find the “Right” answer faster than Google’s ten blue link advertising directory. Therefore, it is likely to evaluate suppliers based on the speed of their responses and how well they meet their users’ needs.

Therefore, often “Less will be more” with “Cached” and “Curated” holiday recommendations, based on the top 10 holidays that match a customer’s requirements, which receive a better reception than showing the customer thousands of options, because they can be delivered faster and are more likely to meet the customer’s needs.

Initially, AI search terms will resemble those of Google, e.g., ‘Cheap Holidays to Spain,’ because this is how we have trained customers to search online.

However, as voice activation and the use of “Digital Twins” to shop for us increases, businesses will be faced with much more complex queries based on the customers’ age, wealth and preferences.

Don’t you think it’s strange that OTAs ask so few questions about a customer before making them search through thousands of holiday options? For me, this is one of the main reasons why homeworkers and high street agents stay in business.

However, this is all set to change with AI Search, and therefore, smart businesses will be investing heavily in harvesting the content that truly matters, which, in my opinion, is “Peer to Peer” reviews.  This will allow them to classify holidays and present results in the same way Spotify or TikTok do by combining my purchasing indicators with a much broader “Lookalike” group based on age and demographics.

This is why TransPerfect, my hosts today, are continually refining their offerings and have decreased their revenue from translation-only services to 50% of their turnover, while exploring innovative new approaches such as enabling English-speaking customer service agents to manage multiple source markets using behind-the-scenes translation tools. Translations remain crucial for how UK businesses access new source markets. However, I believe it is the technology solutions provided by TransPerfect to support sales and customer service operations that will grow the fastest.

Standing still is not an option in the translation space or the travel sector, so what have you got planned, guys?

Wake Up: Travel Retailing is changing.

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Online travel companies have experienced a 30% decline in Google PPC efficiency over the last six months, following the introduction of Gemini AI results at the top of search, as the first wave of AI search changes took effect. However, many have yet to deploy MCP Servers, and failing to do so could soon cause their online visibility to plummet.

The benefits of Large Language Models (LLMs) in summarising internet knowledge into an easily searchable database that provides answers more quickly are evident, but currently, users still need to visit websites to book travel or other services.

However, booking APIs can be integrated with LLMs, and a few early-stage partnerships have been launched, such as the one between Perplexity and TripAdvisor, to provide reviews, hotel bookings, and excursions that can be booked directly from the LLM.

Anthropic, however, radically changed the landscape when it launched the “Model Context Protocol” (MCP), a standardised open protocol designed to make it easier for AI models like Claude to connect with external data sources, applications, and enterprise systems, thereby enhancing their usefulness and flexibility.

Crucially, they have changed the integration resource requirement, with the product “Supplier” now having to map their own APIs and provide MCP Servers that the LLM can easily connect to. Without these MCP Servers, their products will not be visible or bookable within their AI search. OpenAI and Google quickly recognised the advantages and now also demand MCP servers for integration.

An MCP is akin to a standardised “Toolbox” that specifies which tools the LLM can use and then oversees their searches to provide information and, importantly, make bookings.

There are some significant implications here that need to be explored, as nobody yet knows which direction the LLMS will take.

How do you submit your MCP for connection?

Unlike Google, there is currently no method for submitting an MCP for connection, and you must rely on being “Noticed” by the LLM developers. This situation will have to change with the equivalent of an App Store emerging, and all MCPs will be reviewed and connected if they meet the standards. However, currently this does not exist.

How important is it to develop an MCP quickly?

Creating an MCP does require a degree of expertise. Still, agencies like Neural River are already emerging to offer either advice or delivery resources to help travel businesses implement MCP tools. As with everything, the first-mover advantage provides a significant advantage, as many LLMs may prioritise filling gaps rather than duplicating suppliers.

What will be the charging mechanism?

LLMs aim to get customers answers more quickly and offer a faster booking process. This implies that PPC is obsolete, and either a commission or booking fee will need to be paid.

Who will be the Merchant of Record?

In general, LLMs like Perplexity will likely follow the “Amazon” model and become the merchant of record, accepting payments to remove any friction from the search and purchase process.

This applies to lightly regulated accommodation-only sales in the UK but not to “Package Holidays” that are affected by the ATOL bonding regulations. Personally, I believe LLMs will bypass this by using customers’ own credit cards multiple times to book the DIY package holiday elements they offer, or by only using ATOL-bonded businesses.

To clarify, the LLM itself will never access a user’s credit card details, as a secure application layer, such as Google Pay, will store them. Therefore, don’t worry about the security of this element; instead, focus on ensuring that the MCP does not become an unsecured back door into your main reservations systems. This is relatively straightforward to accomplish as long as you recognise the threat.

Will customers still visit my website?

For the near future, the answer is yes. Still, just as mobile traffic initially accounted for a small percentage of site visits but has now increased to 68%, I expect customers to converse with their AI Digital Twins about their holiday plans. These digital twins will conduct all the research and present a shortlist to the customer before making the booking, using MCP access to the supplier. Therefore, your website will become less critical, and the ease of use of your MCP by other computers will be the key deliverable. So, where does this leave “Brand”?

MCPs will not only be used for AI Search.

Once an MCP toolkit has been produced, anyone can connect to it after a commercial deal has been made.

This will result in a new wave of travel businesses combining various MCP Services to develop many niche holiday products, and I have been busy registering relevant domain names and ideas.

Summary.

The LLM’s initial focus was on creating faster answers via AI Search, but MCPs now allow them to move into the search and buy space.

Currently, travellers visit an average of 72 sites and spend 23 hours planning their holidays. If I hear one more “Dinosaur” claiming their customers enjoy the process, I will scream at the sheer stupidity of their views and will gladly see their business shrivel and die.

Human Travel Agents still have a future because a holiday is the largest annual purchase that customers make, and “Trust” is a crucial element of that purchase. However, AI will significantly improve the efficiency of back-office operations for top sellers, inevitably leading to the rise of “Super Agents” and the decline of less efficient colleagues.

The second wave of search change is about to arrive, so hop into your MCP “Lifeboat” now.

SEO Is Out, MCP Is In: How Travel Brands Win in the Age of AI Search.

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As we move away from Google’s 10 blue links catalogue search to AI Search Engines that aim to provide “Answers” and not links, we have all been wondering what will replace SEO and PPC, to allow travel businesses to gain visibility in these new engines.

We now understand that the future is the Model Context Protocol (MCP): an open, standardised interface that enables AI Search Engines to find and interact with travel data and services instantly. Consider MCP as a universal adaptor, like a travel plug adaptor suitable for different countries, allowing AI agents to connect with various booking systems, hotel inventories, pricing engines, and more, without needing custom integrations for each one.

MCP was only launched by Anthropic in November 2024, but has exploded in relevance as major AI providers, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, have now adopted it.

A key weakness of Large Language Models (LLMs) is that they require massive computing power to convert the internet’s knowledge into a searchable database. Once created, these LLMS become outdated instantly, necessitating external links to databases to access up-to-date product pricing.

Most major AI players are openly stating that the incremental gains from adding more data to LLMs are minimal, and they are shifting their focus to more reasoning-driven approaches, whilst integrating up-to-date pricing and tools via MCP links.

This makes developing MCP wrappers for your API feeds to make them understandable by AI search engines a new but essential requirement.

Many years ago, I drew an analogy comparing travel websites to supermarket stores, where businesses spend too much time rearranging stock on the shelves and putting up special offer signs, instead of focusing on building roads to the supermarket and making customer parking easy.

This has never been more the case as we migrate to AI Search.

Very soon, each of us will have a “Digital Twin” on our phones that knows all our likes, tastes, and requirements. These AI agents will contact businesses using AI Search engines MCP connections to source the best holiday offers that match their master’s requirements.

Hence, many holiday makers will no longer even come to your website, with the research and choice stages occurring in the AI Search engine. These engines will choose their suppliers based on how easily their data is accessible via MCP.

This vision may take some time to be fully realised, but observe the visibility of Booking.com and Skyscanner in ChatGPT Agent and Perplexities Comet tools to understand the benefits of having MCP layers.

However, many UK travel businesses are unsure where to start their MCP journey because it’s a highly technical process that requires software, hardware, and a detailed data security strategy, as you’re integrating AI systems into the core of your technology.

This is why Ian Pattison, an ex-Google AI head and now CEO of my Neural River AI Consultancy, has focused his entire team on providing MCP implementation services.

If you want advice, check them out: https://www.neuralriver.ai/

Firstly, a business needs to document its existing visibility through a benchmarking survey, as implementing MCP is an iterative process that requires constant monitoring and feedback loops to drive improvement.

Most travel businesses likely already have price APIS to display their prices on comparison sites like Trivago and Icelolly.com. However, it’s essential to understand that AI engines will not just search based on price; they will also need contextual information, such as whether a hotel is suitable for families or adults, and what review score it has.

AI search queries will often be long and complex, such as “Find me the best 10 hotels based on review scores, for a 7-night holiday to Alcudia, Majorca in May 2026, suitable for families with a kids club and present them in price order”. To be a preferred partner, you will have to answer all these questions in your MCP response.

The exciting aspect of MCP is that it completely overturns the travel hierarchy, with the Google PPC algorithm losing its dominance, leading to an equal playing field where every travel business has a chance to gain access through offering the most comprehensive MCP services.

Inevitably, this will lead to new entrants and businesses that may dominate in the future, including those we have not yet heard of. However, being an asset owner, like a low-cost carrier’s tour operator, also provides a significant advantage, so don’t expect the wholesale change we saw when the internet and low-cost carriers destroyed the traditionally vertically integrated tour operators.

We have some exciting months ahead.