Travel Technology

Travelers say they aren't ready to let AI book a trip. The industry is spending billions anyway — and no one has answered the most basic question: who pays when AI agents get it wrong?

Payment systems increasingly surface at moments that affect both the guest experience and internal operations. This report examines how industry leaders describe the current state of payments, where they see constraints, and which capabilities they believe will matter most over the next several years.

By folding Adara into Sojern, RateGain is putting both travel-planning data and its ad platform under one roof. The result: a unified company capable of linking booking data directly to the ads that drive them.

Sabre says it has rebuilt its technology and wants to be seen as an AI company. But the market will need to see more evidence that customers are signing on.

Aven is embedding MCP into the core system for thousands of hotels. It’s an early signal of how the newly independent company plans to position its infrastructure for AI-driven discovery.

The moment an AI agent handles the complexity of travel, the intermediation layer will have to answer why it exists — or at least why it commands the margin it does.

Amadeus has never committed to a multi-year earnings target before. Doing so now — while AI reshapes travel — raises a question the whole industry is watching: does value stay with the plumbing, or move to the interface?

Bilt is trying to thread a needle in building a hotel booking platform without becoming an OTA that hotels resent. One of its tactics is to offer spending data on its most loyal customers to help luxury hotels provide personalized service for first-time guests.

Amadeus has always been out-front about the adoption of new technologies, and this acquisition will strengthen its position in conversational AI.

The race to modernize aviation is underway. Legacy systems, static loyalty models, and siloed operations are giving way to connected, digital systems built for scale. The carriers that move early and build smart will set the pace for the next decade of air travel.