Travel Technology

TikTok inked a deal to sell a significant portion of its U.S. operation to American investors. The sale may bring clarity, but not comfort, as travel brands wait to see the effect on the algorithms driving discovery.

The company that pioneered MagicBands and transformed queue management into a science is, for now, treating AI as infrastructure rather than imagination when it comes to the guest journey itself. That may be prudent sequencing...or it may be a blind spot that someone else fills first.

Any travel brand can now submit apps and get listed in its new app store — which means Booking.com and Expedia, early movers in OpenAI’s app ecosystem, will soon get new competition to own ChatGPT’s travel conversations.

Travel venture capital is no longer in freefall — but it is far from fully recovered. Now defined by discipline, funding is concentrated in fewer, larger bets on proven companies.

Expedia and Booking are trying to be both the storefront and the supply chain. AI is squeezing the middle, and “doing both” starts to look less like diversification and more like diluted power.

United rewrote its mobile boarding, disruption handling, and personalization by weaving AI throughout its app — not just layering on a chatbot. The real question is whether the automations will ultimately help smooth travel or, by introducing errors or hallucinations, add to the travel friction.

Travel brands understand what personalization should deliver. What’s missing is integrated customer data that allows them to execute consistently across journeys and moments.

Travelport is the smallest of the three major GDS companies and the new CEO brings travel tech experience.

Google’s new beta feature turns nearly any earbuds paired with Android phones into live AI translators. That makes language more accessible — and less of a friction point for travel.

Boom Supersonic is now providing turbines to data centers to help fuel the AI boom. The company’s CEO says the move won’t detract from its ambitions of reviving supersonic flight.