Travel Technology

Hotels are losing the AI conversation – to NerdWallet and Reddit.

Travel brands have serious competition guiding AI models to the info that consumers ask for.

It's not the hotel brands, airlines, or even the OTAs. It's NerdWallet.

New emailed price-drop alerts for hotels give travelers another reason to circle back to Google, creating another moment Google sits between the traveler and the booking.

The hotel industry is quickly implementing AI to get a better handle on search. Mews founder Richard Valtr thinks that is the wrong approach.

Travel startups raised $3.4 billion of venture capital in 2025, the final numbers show, up by 11% from 2024 and marking two consecutive years of growth off the 2023 trough.

AI is shaking up modern hotel distribution at the infrastructure level — and one of the latest signs comes from SiteMinder, which is now linking it to live data from its vast hotel inventory.

As intra-Asia travel picks up, destinations are waking up to the fact that payments are now core travel infrastructure. Sri Lanka’s bet is simple, if Asian travelers live inside super apps and e-wallets, that’s where tourism growth needs to happen too.

The AI strategy divergence among OTAs is no longer theoretical, with the approaches being which layer of the AI stack each one believes is worth owning.

Expedia’s new report says travelers don’t trust AI to book, preferring to transact with travel brands. At the same time, the OTA is expanding across AI platforms wherever trip decisions get made.