Should you focus on AI or social (hint: the answer is both).

Travel inspiration has always been messy. People ask friends, scroll Instagram, search Google, read reviews, open booking sites, watch videos, save reels, look at maps, ask Reddit, compare prices, and then pretend the whole thing was a rational process. AI is now another layer in that stack.

 The snippet (Research from Booking.com 2026 Travel Trend Survey) says search engines, travel booking websites and AI chat tools are all in the mix, with AI chat tools already showing up as a meaningful channel in some markets. This is now inevitable and unavoidable. But it is still worth digging into what part of the funnel is playing the biggest role.

We are placing our bet that the cohort that has the biggest TAM follows this route: social media --> AI helper --> booking. Skift research this social is where 83% of people are. It is where they are daily with their travel thoughts. We'll take that as a big enough and frequent enough segment. This survey from Booking shows lower numbers than that but has social in front in markets like China, India and Argentina.

We've built the collabsmap.com for both ourselves and the brands and destinations we work with to have high visibility across social media. That can be a targeted creator talking to niche audience or a mass of creators flooding the zone all talking about a specific brand or finding the highest performing organic content to co-op into the ad sets. There are lots of different strategies being deployed.

With reely.travel we are building the AI helper. It extracts the products from the videos and organises them visually on a map. It pulls together a clean intent list from which supplier partners can be invited to quote the full basket or their part of it. This is the trip specific brain of self-curated products built over weeks and months of social grazing.

For operators, hotels, DMOs, tours and travel advisors, the practical takeaway is to align your strategy for where the market is moving to. It is to understand how your business shows up across the inspiration stack, especially social media. Are you searchable on there for your keywords? Do your images and creator content match the questions people actually ask when planning? Are you talked about by other people, not just your own account? And are you there when an agent comes looking for a price once you’ve been a winner in social and got the travel consumers attention?

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor reely.travel - you can and should try it for free for your own next trip

Is AI starting to pay off?

Travel companies have started talking about AI in more concrete, results-oriented terms, moving the lens from moonshot to maturity. That sounds less exciting than another agent demo. But are we nearer the end than the beginning on AI? I don't think so.

We are in a settling phase on what AI has proven it can do, based on the tech that rolled out 6 months ago (or longer)
 
For the last couple of years, a lot of AI in travel has been measured by announcement volume. Who launched a chatbot? Who added itinerary planning? Who used the word agentic without anyone in legal visibly flinching? That was the experimentation phase.
 
Then the grown-ups entered the room to ask questions like: Does it reduce service workload? Improve conversion? Help travellers choose? Increase attach rates? Lower call volume? Make content more useful? Help advisors sell better? Improve margins? Get customers to trust the answer enough to act?
 
For these companies this is where AI started to become a business tool rather than an innovation theatre prop. And that's a good thing. The markets like to hear it. But personally, I wouldn't be relaxing and thinking you've got it all figured out. In World Cup parlance I’d suggest we’ve barely reached the first hydration break, let alone the penalty shoot out.

I think Airbnb are showing most clearly where we are heading through their actions. Those actions aren't screaming AI on the press release so you might not see the connection.

They too, focused only on the internal tooling and efficiency piece to start. They claimed they were tackling the hardest stuff first, in particular customer service and coding.

Now they are in a mad scramble to onboard supply of car rentals and experiences by partnering with those who spent decades building that. It is the most un-Airbnb thing imaginable.

You have to stop and ask yourselves why that is? What future do they see that maybe you don't? I can guarantee the answer has a huge AI component. When AI comes asking, you can’t be returning the answer - sorry, we don’t have that.

Question to agentic AI: can you book it?

The most interesting AI travel question right now, is not whether an agent can plan the trip. It is who owns the transaction when the agent is ready to act.
 
Booking Holdings’ Daniel Marovitz explores the idea that consumer AI and autonomous agents can turn travel intent into a transaction. We have had plenty of AI tools that can suggest where to go, compare options and produce a plausible itinerary. Useful, yes. But still mostly advice.
 
The commercial shift happens when the agent can move from “here are your options” to “I booked the thing”.

Is the agent the front door, the booking layer, or just the clever assistant sitting above someone else’s rails?
 
This is why I keep coming back to plumbing. The interface is the easy part to demo. The hard part is identity, payments, inventory, servicing, policy, trust and accountability.

For Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, OTAs, hotels, airlines and travel advisors, the stakes are obvious. If AI owns the conversation but someone else owns the fulfilment, the margin and relationship can move around in uncomfortable ways. If the established platforms own the transaction rails, they may end up powering the agentic future rather than being replaced by it.

This is what we work on every day with Reely.travel. We know this is where travel gets messy very quickly. Who takes payment? Who owns the customer relationship? Who handles the change, cancellation, refund, loyalty credit, supplier failure, overbooking, visa mistake or angry traveller at 11pm? This stuff really matters.

But we also see the opportunity that agentic booking might mean a much bigger basket than we’ve seen in the past, the one human advisors commonly see, because more of the details are being worked out before we get to asking how much. This is looking a lot more like the mythical connected trip.

Our approach is to ask those who can fulfil the whole basket for a quote on the whole basket and run a reverse auction as the price shopping phase that most consumers do manually. You don’t need to be cheapest on every line, you just need to be cheaper overall.

AI imagery might be affecting your image

This is your semi-regular reminder about using AI image and videos in your marketing.

Gun tours and activities marketer Chris Torres this week said: “I find myself being put off by brands that rely on obviously AI generated images and videos. You can usually spot them a mile away.”

For Chris (and I) this is about trust.

Your marketing should be building confidence in your future customer.

“If a company is happy to create a false representation of itself, what message does that send? Customers build expectations based on what they see, and if those expectations don't match reality, trust starts to erode before the relationship has even begun. AI is an incredible tool, but I think it should help tell your story... not invent one.”

AI is a great shortcut for many things. This isn’t one of them. Keep it real people.

(CollabsMap is helping over 800 companies gather real photos and videos from pros who were already heading their way, if looking for a hack to get this done more cost efficiently)

Is Mindtrip in a full pivot to B2B with DMO’s?

The big knock on travel apps has always been their infrequent use, yet the majority of new AI apps create one-shot itineraries, building this infrequency into the product.

New research from Mindtrip, Sabre, Sojern and MMGY Travel Intelligence, says more than half of travellers already use AI to plan trips, while many destination marketers are still working out what their AI strategy actually is.
 
The headline framing is that travellers are two years ahead of the industry. I don’t know how precise “two years” is, but the direction feels right.
 
Consumers do not wait for industry roadmaps. They find the tool that makes the annoying bit easier and use it. Search was like that. Maps were like that. Reviews were like that. TikTok became a travel discovery engine without asking permission from anyone with “VP Strategy” in their title. AI is doing the same thing.
 
The bit I think that is maybe missing is the nuance in how people really put their trips together. Most people continue searching from the moment a destination is considered until they are on the plane home. Their ears are open. Their questions to friends are pointed and their grazing in social media is constant, for months. THIS is the frequent use that travel has craved. We shouldn't be trying to push this away. We should be trying to get as close to this as we possibly can. 

Maybe this is why MindTrip is pivoting so hard into B2B with DMO's as their press release here talks to? 

Maybe one-shot itineraries from a prompt weren't what people wanted afterall?

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