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For more than a decade, travel planning began with a search bar. Maybe you typed “top ski destinations” or “weekend flights to Austin.” You opened tabs, compared fares, skimmed reviews. Then you repeated it for hotels. But that familiar way of trip planning is already changing, and quickly.
Today, a rising number of travelers are prompting AI assistants with queries like, “Plan a long weekend in Austin at a boutique hotel with live music.” In seconds, the assistant can design an itinerary and some can even book your stay. Soon, more platforms will offer AI-enabled ways to book flights and hotels. While full AI-led travel transactions aren’t here yet, the user behavior shift is—and it’s accelerating.
This is the rise of agentic commerce: AI agents acting on behalf of users to discover, recommend, and eventually transact. It’s reshaping the travel industry’s front door, and companies need to act quickly to stay ahead of the competition.
The disappearing search bar and a new route to discovery
Travelers are increasingly bypassing search engines, using AI prompts like, “family-friendly beach resorts in July.” In fact, PwC’s Holiday Outlook showed that 68% of survey respondents expect to use AI for comparing flights and 57% for booking travel this holiday season.
As travel discovery moves from search engines to large language models (LLMs), the rules will change. Search engine optimization (SEO) won’t cut it. Travel brands now need to prepare for generative engine optimization (GEO), ensuring content is well-structured, current, and accessible to AI.
The challenge? LLMs often favor sources with rich, structured data—typically online travel agencies (OTAs). Without an update to how content is managed, that means smaller hotels and niche brands risk disappearing from AI-generated results.
Transaction still lags—but readiness can’t
Some AI tools are testing live bookings and payment integrations. But much of the travel ecosystem still runs on legacy fare rules, static content, and fragmented distribution systems. That doesn’t make the shift less urgent. It just means the first wave of agentic commerce will be about visibility, not transactions.
How to ensure your brand is discoverable by GEO:
- Audit your content and inventory for AI readability and structure.
- Evaluate your OTA and GDS exposure in light of AI platform integrations.
- Build application programming interface (API) readiness so AI tools can retrieve pricing, availability, and product details in real time.
Loyalty as your AI-era asset
The promise of loyalty programs has always been personalization. But AI assistants may soon know more about a user through prompts than points. That raises a real question: How can loyalty data and related personalization add value in the age of AI?
If the data is made portable and structured, loyalty programs can actually be one of the best bridges to your brand. Imagine a traveler prompting their assistant with “Use my Marriott (or Wyndham or United) loyalty profile.” Suddenly, preferences, point balances, and booking history can inform a smarter, branded result.
Steps to consider:
- Make loyalty data shareable. Allow trusted third-party platforms to access loyalty profiles, points, and preferences—securely and with user consent.
- Structure identity and preference data. Organize customer profiles in formats LLMs can understand and use.
- Test loyalty-aware content. Try including perks like upgrades or free bags in your content, and measure how often AI assistants surface your brand in response.
From browsing to prompting: Transforming your owned channels
The promise of travel sites has always been easy discovery and confident booking. But AI raises the bar: travelers now expect a conversational planner that understands intent, constraints, and loyalty value in one flow. The question is how to turn your site into a smart, on-brand assistant that captures demand instead of ceding it to aggregators.
If product, content, and loyalty data are made portable and structured, your site can host an assistant that plans trips end to end. For example, you want to be able to respond to prompts like this one: “Find me a long weekend trip from Boston under $500, with an aisle seat, and a hotel with a late checkout. Use my points if it's a good value.” Providing greater transparency into inventory, fares, ancillaries, and loyalty perks can shape a smarter, owned channel result that converts.
Steps to consider:
Design the experience. Map how travelers interact across search, plan, book, and manage, then shape your site’s flow, brand voice, and interface to match. Add clear confirmations, smart defaults, and guardrails for things like accuracy, change fees, and fare rules.
Make real-time data accessible. Expose real-time availability, pricing, ancillaries, loyalty profiles and balances, and payments via secure, permissioned APIs that an AI agent can discover.
Structure content for AI retrieval. Organize your product and destination content, like destination guides and product details, so LLMs can find and use it. Then track how often your brand shows up, set safety and consent policies, and instrument end-to-end analytics related to A/B test prompts, offers, and tone.
Ready for agent-to-agent commerce
The promise of agent ecosystems is seamless cooperation. As brands deploy their own assistants, travelers are likely to use third-party AI agents to plan and book travel plans. The question is how to make your brand’s agent ready to collaborate with others without losing control of experience, economics, or trust.
If identity, policies, and offers are portable and structured, your agent can negotiate, verify, and fulfill with partner agents while staying on brand. A prompt might be something like this: “Coordinate air, hotel, and car using my status and budget, confirm change rules, then hold the best combo.”
Steps to consider:
- Frame the interaction flow. Map how your agent should collaborate with others—across search, quotes, bookings, changes, and customer service. Define handshakes, fallbacks, and when a human should step in. Make sure your brand voice and confirmation experience come through clearly.
- Support secure data sharing. Share identity, inventory, pricing, and consent information through clear, secure APIs. Include practical specs like webhooks, rate limits, and receipts to help partners integrate and audit efficiently.
- Set the rules and track results. Put policy and governance guardrails in place for consent, data use, and safety, plus clear “off switches” if something goes wrong. Measure which prompts and partners drive performance, and test what’s working.
Leading through the shift: Five strategic moves
Agentic commerce rewards brands that show up quickly, credibly, and contextually. But it also challenges direct relationships. Here’s where to focus now:
- Distribution modernization: Reassess OTA and platform relationships. Expose pricing, availability, and product data through deep-linking APIs. Prioritize platforms that increase visibility without eroding brand value.
- Content and GEO readiness: Structure content in formats that AI systems can interpret. Use schema, structured data markup, and high-quality visuals to make your brand legible to LLMs. Set up mechanisms to monitor your AI visibility continuously, not just once.
- Loyalty and data integration: Build identity frameworks that allow AI systems to access, interpret, and act on loyalty information, without sacrificing privacy or control.
- Conversational owned experiences: Make your site, app, and email “agent-ready” by defining conversational journeys, exposing real-time APIs (inventory, loyalty, payments), and instrumenting consent-safe analytics for continuous optimization.
- Agent-to-agent readiness: Publish clear data contracts and policies so your brand agent can authenticate, negotiate, and fulfill with partner agents while preserving consent, economics, and brand control.
Don’t just respond—reimagine your role
Agentic commerce won’t change travel overnight. The transactional layer may take time to mature. But the discovery layer is already shifting, and travelers are building new habits fast.
This is a chance for travel brands to rethink how they appear, compete, and build loyalty in AI-led experiences. When the journey begins—and perhaps ends—with a prompt, the companies that act now will determine who’s still visible when the map redraws.
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