Trip planning has moved into the assistant. Travellers no longer start on a search engine and click through ten tabs — they ask: "Plan me a five-day trip to Portugal in May with good food and not too touristy." The destinations, hotels and experiences named in that itinerary get discovered and booked. If your property or experience is not surfaced, you are absent from the plan before the traveller has even chosen dates.
Assistants build travel recommendations from rich, structured, authoritative content — and corroborate it across trusted sources. The perennial challenge for travel brands is that aggregators and OTAs structure their data impeccably and dominate traditional results, siphoning direct bookings and the margin that comes with them. Beating that requires content an assistant can confidently surface and cite as coming from you, the source.
What actually moves the needle for travel
- Rich, structured content about your destination, property or experience that assistants can extract, cite and slot into an itinerary.
- Direct-booking visibility in AI and search that reduces dependence on OTAs and reclaims margin.
- Authority and citations so a model recommends your offering with confidence rather than defaulting to an aggregator.
- Local and experience-level signals — what you offer, for whom, when and where — so you match the specific trip a traveller is planning.
- Enquiry automation that answers questions and captures bookings around the clock, converting inspiration while interest is high.
What winning looks like
Your destination, hotel or experience gets recommended when travellers plan with AI, discovered directly rather than through an OTA, and converted into bookings before the moment of inspiration fades — more direct revenue, less commission lost to the aggregators.