AeroLOPA's New App: The Seat-Selection Tool SeatGuru Users Were Waiting For
AeroLOPA's paid app brings tail number predictions, Sunny Side tracking, and seat ratings across 1,600 aircraft types — filling the gap SeatGuru left when it shut down in late 2025.
Google AI Mode Hotel Booking: What Agentic Search Actually Changes for Travelers
Google's agentic hotel booking tool is live in AI Mode with 10 major partners. Here's how it works and what it means for OTAs, hotels, and how you plan trips.
Skift State of Travel 2026: What the $11 Trillion Industry Is Actually Doing
Skift's 2026 report maps the global travel industry through a new framework — and the headline finding is counterintuitive: price pressure is real, but 88% of travelers are optimizing their trips, not canceling them.
Google Maps Now Books Hotels for You: What Agentic AI Means for Travel Search
Google Maps now checks hotel availability and compares rates via natural language. The search-to-booking gap where OTAs built their business is closing.
Corporate Travel's Rulebook Is Its AI Booking Advantage
Amex GBT and Kayak for Business are shipping AI booking agents first: corporate travel's policy rules give agents what consumer AI still lacks.
Expedia Buys Layla: What Its AI Trip-Planner Bet Signals
Expedia acquired Berlin-based AI trip planner Layla, which has planned 1.1 million trips across 16 languages — accelerating its shift to specialized AI agents.
54% of Travelers Don't Trust Your AI Recommendations
A new Wunderkind report finds only 24% of travelers trust AI-generated travel recommendations — and the fix isn't more AI, it's recommendations grounded in actual intent.
Hopper to Pay $35M FTC Settlement Over Hidden Fees and Misleading Price Freeze Claims
Hopper pre-selected mandatory 'Tips' and 'VIP Support' fees, buried them in scroll, and overstated Price Freeze benefits — earning roughly $85M from the practices over three years. The FTC settlement bans the conduct and funds consumer redress.
AI Travel Planning's Hidden Problem: Being Connected Isn't Enough
Skift tested ChatGPT and Claude connectors for travel brands and found a critical gap: brands can be fully integrated into AI chatbots and still get skipped when travelers ask. Here's what the difference looks like.
Apple Wallet Gets a Trip Pass — and Disney World Is the Launch Partner
iOS 27 turns the Apple Wallet Key into a dynamic trip hub. Disney World MagicMobile is the first to use it — showing park reservations, Lightning Lane selections, and dining reservations live-updated in one place.
AI Is Driving Travel Traffic — But Airline Fares Are Still a Black Box
Adobe data shows AI is sending more engaged visitors to travel sites than almost any other channel. The problem is that airline fare data remains too complex and fragmented for AI agents to actually parse and compare.
IHG Is Replacing Its Hotel Technology Stack While Growing Franchisee Margins — Here's Why
IHG is deploying Amadeus reservations, Google Cloud guest data, and AI revenue management across 1,200+ hotels while CEO Maalouf argues the strategy is expanding franchisee margins, not squeezing them.
Hotels Spent $100 Million Fighting OTAs. A Decade Later, the Share Barely Moved.
Hilton's 'Stop Clicking Around' campaign launched ten years ago with a $100 million investment designed to redirect travelers from Expedia and Booking.com to hotel-direct channels. Skift's analysis of what actually happened — and why AI agents may reset the distribution equation entirely.
Travelport Rebuilds Its Core for AI Travel Agents With TripServices
TripServices is Travelport's cloud-native API platform designed for AI agent consumption — clean normalized data, deterministic APIs, and a $50M capital injection backing the build.
Skyscanner's CEO on Why Agentic Booking Won't Kill Metasearch
Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista on agent-to-agent flight search: why the company stays a data layer, not an OTA, and why that's the winning position.
The Hidden Cost of AI Agents in Travel: When Infinite Search Breaks the Economics
AI agents can run 881,076 fare queries in the time a human runs 10. Travel search was built on the assumption humans eventually stop looking. That assumption is now broken — and airlines and hotels are scrambling to respond.
The AI Hotels Are Buying Now Will Look Like Fax Machines by 2029
At Skift's Data + AI Summit, Adam Harris argued that hotel CEOs signing multi-year AI contracts are betting on probabilistic systems structurally unsuited to running hotel operations.
Uber's Hotel Play: Why Super-App Travel Is Harder Than It Looks
Uber carries 100M+ airport riders annually and partnered with Expedia for hotels. History says converting that audience into bookings is the hard part.
Luxury Brands Are Losing Bookings to AI Agents They Were Never Built to Impress
AI agents now account for an estimated 15–25% of luxury travel bookings — and they're completely indifferent to aspirational photography, brand heritage, and emotional storytelling.
AI Travel Stack: Five Competing Layers, One Platform-Level Threat
Booking, Expedia, Airbnb, and Sabre have each bet on a different AI stack layer. The risk: Apple and Google may dominate the OS layer before any OTA wins their chosen position.
The Agentic Friction: Trust vs. Autonomy in Travel 2026
Analyzing the architectural disconnect between travel industry AI investment and consumer trust in autonomous booking systems.
Hyper-Personalized Logistics: The 2026 Travel Orchestration
How AI agents and unified data streams are replacing traditional travel agents with autonomous, real-time itinerary management.
Post-COVID Travel: Rising Taxes and the AI Disruption
Analyzing the impact of Barcelona's doubling hotel tax and Amadeus's strategic move into conversational AI on the future of global travel.
The Fragmented Frontier: Travel in the Era of Hyper-Personalized Logistics
How AI agents and decentralized travel protocols are ending the era of the mass-market itinerary.