AI Agents Transforming Travel Distribution: Who Wins at the Point of Decision?

In the travel industry, artificial intelligence is evolving from a supportive tool into an active player. Autonomous AI agents can research trips, compare offers, and guide booking processes - thereby transforming the traditional sales chain.

Bhanu Chopra, Founder & Managing Director of RateGain Travel Technologies Limited – a global provider of AI-powered SaaS solutions for the travel and hospitality industries – explains where the industry stands today, the role that data and real-time availability play, and why hotels must prepare for a new competition for guest access. In this interview, he provides insights into current developments, strategies, and concrete steps that travel companies can take to prepare for the next phase of AI-powered distribution.

1. Six months after ITB Berlin: Where has the industry made real progress on AI, and where is it still holding back?

The honest answer is that the gap I flagged in March has narrowed in some places and stayed stubborn in others. Where I see genuine progress is in the willingness to run agents in live environments rather than sandboxes. Over the last six months, the industry has reached a critical inflection point, moving beyond basic chatbots to agentic AI, autonomous systems capable of searching, comparing, and completing end-to-end hotel bookings within natural language interfaces.

Where the industry is still holding back is data readiness. Everyone can build a bot now. The hard part is the plumbing underneath it. If your PMS, your CRM and your booking systems are full of fragmented or poorly structured data, no model layered on top will save you.

The other thing holding people back is organizational, not technical. Teams are still structured around old silos, so even when the technology is ready, the decision rights and incentives are not. An agent that can act across pricing and marketing is only useful if the business lets it act across pricing and marketing.

The bottleneck was never the technology; it is the courage to trust the technology, plus the unglamorous work of getting your data house in order. The companies doing both are pulling ahead faster than anything I have seen in this industry before.

2. Are consumer AI agents already condensing the fragmented travel journey, and which parts of distribution get disrupted first?

Yes, and it is happening at the discovery end first, which is exactly where I expected it. Think about how a trip used to begin. A traveller opened ten tabs, jumped between a search engine, a couple of OTAs, a review site and a map, and slowly assembled a decision. That messy front end is precisely what an AI agent is built to collapse. Increasingly the traveller states an intent once, and the agent does the comparing, the shortlisting and a lot of the reasoning that used to eat hours.

The part of the chain most exposed first is the middle layer whose entire job was aggregation and comparison. If your value was simply putting options side by side, an agent now does that natively and does it more personally. The visibility game is shifting to where intent forms, which is often before a traveller ever reaches a booking channel.

What gets disrupted more slowly is the layer that actually holds inventory, controls pricing and owns the guest relationship. Agents still need somewhere trustworthy to transact, and they need accurate, real-time rates and availability to act on.

The fragmentation the traveller experienced is disappearing. The competition over who sits at the point of decision is only intensifying.

3. What happens when autonomous agents begin to communicate with one another across companies, for example, when a traveler’s agent speaks directly with a hotel’s pricing agent?

This is the part I find genuinely exciting, because it changes the nature of distribution itself. Today distribution is a series of handoffs, connectors, formats and delays. When a traveller's agent can query a hotel's distribution or pricing agent directly, you move from periodic updates to a live conversation between two systems. The traveller's agent says here is who I am and what I want. The hotel's agent responds with a price and an offer shaped for exactly that context, in real time.

That is a machine-to-machine negotiation, and it will lead to a rise in agentic bookings, so it rewards whoever has the smartest, fastest, best-informed agent on their side of the table. For a hotel, that is enormous leverage if you are prepared, because your pricing agent can hold your commercial logic, protect your margin and still personalize.

The prerequisite is that your data and your commercial rules have to be machine-ready. An agent cannot act on intuition or on a spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays. It acts on structured, real-time signals.

The risk to be honest about is trust and accountability. When two agents transact autonomously across company boundaries, someone must own what happens when it goes wrong. The industry has not solved that yet. The protocols and guardrails for this agent economy are still being written and getting them right matters as much as the technology.

4. When agents shape what travelers discover and book: Who owns the customer relationship, and does AI empower service providers or create new intermediaries?

This is the trillion-dollar question, and I do not think the answer is settled. But I am more optimistic for suppliers than the doom narrative suggests. Hotels own something no model can manufacture, which is years of proprietary guest data and a genuine, direct relationship with the traveller. That is a real moat, and agentic AI is finally the thing that turns that dormant data into action. Used well, AI can give a hotel more direct, more personalized access to its guests than it has ever had, not less.

That said, I would be naive to pretend disintermediation only cuts one way. Every previous technology wave in travel promised to hand power back to suppliers, and in practice a powerful new intermediary usually emerged to sit at the point of discovery. If the dominant travel agent of the next decade is an AI assistant that millions of people trust by default, then a new gatekeeper is being born whether we like it or not. Visibility inside that agent becomes the new shelf space.

So, my honest view is that both things happen at once. Suppliers who invest in their data and show up intelligently at the point of intent will capture more of the relationship directly. Suppliers who stay passive will find a new layer negotiating on their behalf and taking a cut for it.

5. Beyond a culture of curiosity, what concrete steps should travel companies take now to prepare their distribution strategies?

Curiosity is still the foundation, and I would not walk that back. But six months on I would add a harder edge to it. Curiosity without follow-through is just a nicer word for waiting, and this is not a moment to wait.

First, fix your data before you buy another AI tool. This is the least glamorous advice I can give and the most important. Agents act on the data you feed them, so if your pricing, inventory and guest information is fragmented across systems, you are building on sand. Getting your data clean, structured and real-time is not an IT project you delegate and forget. It is a board-level priority.

Second, make your distribution agent-ready. Assume that a growing share of demand will arrive through AI agents rather than traditional channels, and ask whether your rates, availability and offers can be discovered and acted on by a machine in real time. If a traveller's agent cannot cleanly transact with you, you are invisible in the channel that is growing fastest.

Third, redesign how decisions are made, not just which tools you own. The old walls between revenue, marketing and distribution were built for a world of human handoffs. Give your teams and your agents the mandate to act across those functions, because the value of AI shows up only when it is allowed to connect them.

If I compress all of it into one line, it is this. Stay curious but move. The technology is ready, the advantage is real, and it is going to the operators willing to do the unglamorous work now rather than admire the problem for another year.

More on AI in tourism

Bhanu Chopra already discussed how AI is shifting the balance of power in travel distribution at the ITB Berlin Convention 2026 during the session “AI and the New Power Map of Travel.” You can watch the full session here on YouTube.

The latest episode of the Travel Hero podcast offers even more perspectives on the future of travel: Charlotte Lamp Davies speaks with Mathis Bold (GIATA) and Alex Bainbridge (Autoura) about how AI is transforming the travel industry, what impacts are already being felt by companies and travelers today, and where this trend is headed.