Travel Technology

The UK keeps producing travel tech companies that leave home before they grow up, and the reasons should worry the stakeholders.

India has the literacy gaps, the linguistic diversity, the voice-first consumer behavior, and now the sovereign AI stack to build voice-first travel. No other large travel market combines all of them at this scale.

Brand recognition, a cognitive shortcut for human buying decisions, means nothing to AI agents that can reason through every option every time. That's shifting travel's entire marketing apparatus.

The conversations happening at the Skift Data + AI Summit go beyond adoption. They will address what happens when ambition meets reality, when speed collides with trust, and when the channels you’ve built your business on start to shift beneath you.

Expedia hasn’t said much publicly about when its B2B MCP server will arrive. Now an executive says it’s expected in months — a key step toward letting partners’ AI agents connect directly to Expedia’s travel inventory.

Google has been building toward agentic hotel booking in plain sight. Now it's said so out loud.

Expedia isn't reinventing the OTA. It's stretching the definition — upstream into inspiration, downstream into day-of-travel — so booking becomes one stop in a longer relationship.

HBX has been trying to diversify from reselling hotel rooms since before it went public. Each time, the answer is new inventory and better tech for selling. Experiences and AI are the latest pitch.

Hotel owners see operating-cost inflation grinding margins. One third-party manager is publicly betting that AI and other technologies are the most promising route back to profitability.

TikTok is moving from trip inspiration into bookings, turning videos for hotels and experiences into bookable inventory inside the app.