The Future of Travel and AI: 7 Takeaways From Skift 2026

What happens when AI becomes your travel agent? Can an Instagram post make you change your holiday booking? And what did Prince Harry have to say to some of travel’s biggest bosses? Spotlight CEO Lucy Clifton shares seven things she came home from Skift Global Forum thinking about.

New York was having quite the week. The UN General Assembly was in town. Trump was meeting world leaders, including Andy Burnham. First Avenue was closed to ordinary traffic, motorcades were everywhere, and NYC had officially designated the week a “Gridlock Alert”, with Midtown traffic averaging under four miles an hour. And over at the Javits Center, with the Hudson glittering outside under ridiculously blue September skies, nearly 1,000 travel people from 45 countries and 463 companies were talking about the future of the industry at Skift Global Forum.

Inevitably, there was a lot of AI. Hilton President and CEO Christopher Nassetta was talking about what it takes to “show up” when travellers start asking AI where to stay. Accor Chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin summed up his approach in six words: “Automate the ordinary, humanise the extraordinary.” And when Qatar Airways Group CEO Hamad Al-Khater was asked where he would draw the line for AI in travel, he didn’t hesitate: “I would say it has to be human in the loop.”

Then, at about 3pm on Wednesday, a rumour started going around the Javits Center: Prince Harry was coming. He was. The room was suddenly rammed.

The Duke of Sussex wasn’t there to talk about royal travel. He had a question for an industry spending vast sums on technology and AI.

It was one of many moments over two days that made me put down my coffee and pay attention. Because underneath all the talk about AI, something much bigger seemed to be happening. The way we find holidays is changing. The way we choose them is changing. Even what happens after we’ve booked is changing. And some of the people building the future of travel don’t think the answer is necessarily more technology.

Here are the seven things I came home thinking about.

1. There’s a new middleman in travel. And it’s AI.

For years, technology was supposed to make travel more direct. We’d book with the hotel or airline, compare everything ourselves and gradually cut out the middlemen.

Now AI is putting a new layer between the traveller and the travel brand.

Nassetta talked about a future in which personal AI assistants help people decide where to go and where to stay. American Express Travel is already using AI alongside its human travel counsellors, helping them find information faster while giving customers the option to move from AI to a person. Instead of typing “best hotels in Sicily” into Google and opening 15 tabs, we may increasingly ask an AI what it thinks we should consider.

That doesn’t make the human travel adviser obsolete. Quite the opposite, as we’ll come to. But it does mean there’s a powerful new voice in the room.

For travel brands, the question is no longer simply: will a traveller find us? It is also: will their AI know enough about us to recommend us?

2. You can’t count on a booking any more

A booking used to mean you’d got the customer. Not any more. Seth Borko, Head of Research at Skift, had a stat that made me sit up: nearly half of travellers surveyed had, at least once, cancelled and rebooked accommodation because of something they subsequently saw on social media.

McKinsey Partner Margaux Constantin had an explanation for why we keep looking: “Price is first and FOMO second.” Around 40% of travellers continue searching in the hope of finding a better deal, while 30% are still wondering whether there’s something better out there.

IHG‘s Heather Balsley put it neatly: “Inspiration doesn’t stop at the moment of booking.” Priceline‘s Traci Mercer went further. The industry used to see booking as “the point of execution, like we were done there”. Now, she said, it’s simply “that milestone on the journey”.

You’ve chosen the hotel, handed over your credit-card details and mentally started packing. Then somebody you follow posts somewhere fabulous on Instagram, and suddenly you’re wondering whether you’ve booked the wrong place.

Borko described travel planning as an “orbit” rather than the old straight line from dreaming to researching to booking. We’re surrounded by travel inspiration all the time, and booking no longer switches it off.

For travel brands, there’s a fairly sobering lesson in that: getting the booking may no longer be enough. PR and marketing don’t stop doing their job once someone clicks ‘book’. The stories, reviews and social posts a traveller sees afterwards may be just as important in reassuring them that they chose well, and stopping somewhere else from turning their head.

3. Instagram can steal a customer. But can it sell a £10,000 holiday?

There’s a useful reality check to all this: a huge audience isn’t necessarily the same thing as influence, and influence isn’t necessarily the same thing as a booking.

That distinction becomes particularly important in luxury travel, where the thing being sold is expensive, complicated and rather more consequential than a pair of trainers.

Brands are already moving away from the old model of finding an influencer with a vast following, paying for a beautifully controlled post and counting the impressions. Hyatt, for example, has been shifting from one-off campaigns towards longer-term relationships with a community of creators, giving up some control in return for content that feels more authentic and useful.

Evan Frank, Co-Founder of Fora, the travel-adviser platform, made a point I loved: beautiful content can create desire, but when you’re spending serious money on a trip, you still want expertise, judgement and someone who will be accountable if it all goes wrong. The value of that expertise is being able to cut through all the noise and say “no, it’s this, not that”.

For PR and marketing teams, there’s another reason to look at creators differently. Their value increasingly extends beyond the people who follow them. Information published on social media, YouTube, review sites and elsewhere can also help shape what AI knows about a hotel or destination, and therefore whether it recommends it.

So perhaps the question isn’t “how many followers does this creator have?” any more. It’s “how useful is the story they’re putting into the world, and who might act on it?”

4. AI gives us the whole world. Then recommends three hotels.

For years, travel websites have competed by giving us more: more hotels, more flights, more filters, more reviews, more choice. AI turns that logic on its head. Its great appeal is that we don’t have to wade through all of it.

Ask an AI where to stay in Paris and you don’t necessarily want 427 hotels. You want it to understand that you love small hotels, hate corporate lobbies, want to walk everywhere, are travelling with two teenagers and would rather spend £600 a night on somewhere brilliant than £900 on somewhere merely fashionable. Then you want it to say: try these three.

Audrey Hendley at American Express Travel had a lovely phrase for this: AI “distils the world down” for the traveller. And that, I think, is both its magic and the thing travel brands should be paying very close attention to.

If AI is doing the distilling, who makes it into the glass?

For travel brands, that’s the rather important bit. Nassetta at Hilton talked about the need to be wherever customers want to shop, including through AI agents, and to be “really smart” about the content you create, “to make sure in today’s world, tomorrow’s world, you show up”. Hilton, he said, is already working with “all the big LLMs”, making sure the brand is present as this new way of finding and booking travel develops.

It’s a deceptively simple phrase, and one that chimed rather neatly with our own research into AI visibility, Invisible or Influential?, which found that high-quality editorial coverage can double a brand’s visibility in AI search compared with relying on SEO alone. Being on page two of Google was never ideal; being fourth on a list of three AI recommendations is considerably worse.

For PR teams, that changes the question. It’s no longer only: how many people will see this story? It’s also: what will this story teach the machines that increasingly help those people decide where to go?

5. Maybe we should stop talking about Gen Z

Travel loves a generation. Millennials wanted experiences. Gen Z wants authenticity. Gen Alpha, presumably, will want something else entirely by the time they’re old enough to pay for it.

But I increasingly wonder how useful these labels actually are.

Where you come from, your culture, matters more than your age in determining what you expect.

Ho Ren Yung, Deputy CEO, Banyan Group

Her example was what Banyan calls “kinship travel” in Asia: large groups and multigenerational families travelling together, which changes everything from the experiences they want to the way hotels need to be designed. More broadly, Banyan is betting that what increasingly connects travellers isn’t their birth year but “participation and purpose”, what they care about, why they’re travelling and how they want to engage with a place.

That feels particularly true in luxury. A 28-year-old and a 58-year-old might have far more in common, the food they care about, the places they want to explore, their interest in design or wellness, than either does with somebody born in the same decade.

And yet travel marketing still has a tendency to put people into generational boxes and reverse-engineer a campaign for them. Cue the Gen Z hotel with a DJ, a rooftop bar and somebody holding a phone.

Perhaps the more useful question isn’t “how do we reach Gen Z?” but “what brings these people together?”

For PR, that opens up much more interesting territory. Start with the passion, community or point of view, rather than the date on somebody’s birth certificate, and the stories get better too.

6. The more AI we use, the more valuable humans may become

There’s an understandable assumption that every task AI learns to do is one less thing for a human to do. In travel, I’m not convinced it’s quite that simple.

The more interesting question is which bits we actually want technology to take away.

Automate the ordinary, humanise the extraordinary.

Sébastien Bazin, Chairman and CEO, Accor

Bazin at Accor had my favourite formulation. Nobody has ever checked into a great hotel and thought, what made that special was how long the receptionist spent typing my passport details into a computer.

Take away the administration, searching and repetitive questions, and you potentially give people more time to do the things humans are rather good at: noticing, judging, reassuring, improvising and looking after somebody.

American Express Travel is already thinking along those lines. Its AI can help travel counsellors find and process information faster, while customers can move to a human when they want to. That doesn’t sound like replacing expertise to me. It sounds like giving expertise better tools.

And the more complicated or expensive the trip, the more that matters. Frank at Fora described travel as a “high stakes, high consideration purchase”. When information becomes almost limitless, somebody who can judge it, and take responsibility when things go wrong, becomes more useful, not less.

That may be one of the more interesting paradoxes of AI in luxury travel: if machines make information cheap and plentiful, judgement becomes more valuable.

For luxury brands, that’s the opportunity. Use AI to remove the friction. Don’t use it to remove the people who make the experience worth paying more for.

7. The Duke of Sussex asked the question nobody else did

Prince Harry had already had quite a day. Earlier he’d been across town speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative about the dangers of AI and social media for children. By 5pm the Duke of Sussex was at the Javits Center in his other role, as founder of Travalyst, the not-for-profit coalition he set up to make travel a force for good.

His question? “How much are you investing in technology and AI next year, and how much are you investing in the long-term health of the places that your businesses depend on?”

It was quite a question to put to a room full of travel CEOs. Because for all the excitement about making travel easier to discover, book and sell, none of it works particularly well if we destroy the thing people wanted to travel for in the first place.

Harry talked about overtourism, communities and the way the industry measures success. “Where’s the destination lifetime value?” he asked. And: “How many of your KPIs actually measure the success of a destination?”

I thought about those questions afterwards. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to persuade more people to go somewhere. Perhaps part of our job should also be helping people discover somewhere else, spreading attention, telling stories beyond the obvious places and giving travellers reasons to look beyond the same photograph everybody else has already taken.

Harry talked about “widening the funnel” and encouraging people towards destinations off the beaten track. Ironically, at the very moment AI is becoming extraordinarily good at narrowing down our choices, perhaps one of the most valuable things good travel storytelling can do is open them back up again.

I came away from New York excited about what AI can do for travel. But perhaps the most useful question isn’t what the technology can do.

It’s what we want travel to do, and then how we use the technology to help us get there.

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