I am taking a deep breath after wrapping up a fun few weeks of business travel. The great benefit of being on the road is hearing directly from our readers and, boy, did you have a lot of interesting things of interesting things to say! Your feedback is exciting, a great learning opportunity, and often, more than a little thought-provoking. 

It’s all good, though! And it culminated in a live onstage keynote at last week’s Skift Data and AI Summit, where I presented the five AI tensions that travel companies face as they work to close the gap between the AI strategy that’s written in a slide deck and the AI reality as it exists in the world today. For each tension, the 400+ travel leaders gathered in New York City got to vote live on their reaction to this framework and which tensions resonated the most with them. Talk about great feedback!

The five tensions are below. But before I share the spoilers, which one stands out the most to you?

Ready for the big reveal…? The tension causing the biggest headache to travel organizations is speed vs. trust. 

Mark Zuckerberg famously advocated that early employees at Facebook should “move fast and break things”. AI has the potential to be an accelerant, especially for internal development and operational teams, but how do we put guardrails around it to protect the relationships and brands we have been building for decades? 

This tension isn’t unique to AI. All software development faces the efficiency versus trust trade-off in some way. But the surface area of what we can automate with AI means that nowadays this tension belongs not just to the computer engineers or UX designers, but to the entire organization, from the front-desk to the C-suite. 

The challenge is especially acute for travel. AI is a probabilistic tool, but travel is fundamentally a deterministic transaction — either you have my booking or you do not. And that means, in our opinion, there will need to be some sort of trust layer for AI in travel to backstop the transaction.

Here’s the paradox: travelers want efficiency and today nearly two-thirds are using AI to plan at least some part of their trip, but less than 2% of Gen Z travelers, almost none, would trust AI to manage a travel booking fully from start to finish. 

However, just what that trust layer looks like is still TBD. Perhaps the suppliers will own the trust layer and usher in a new wave of direct bookings. Or maybe, the big online travel platforms can combine their existing consumer brands with tech savvy to strengthen their market dominance. Or maybe the Claudes and ChatGPTs of the world will own trust in this new world. 

Let’s also not overlook internal trust between employees and management and within travel teams. One of the harshest lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic has been how hard it is to rebuild employee trust across our sector after massive layoffs. The damage from the 2020-era brain drain is still being felt across travel and tourism today. 

The Doorman Fallacy was coined by Ogilvy UK Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland with travel in mind. His point was that it’s easy to look at the doorman who opens the door at a luxury hotel as an inefficient cost. Install an automatic door and job done! Except the doorman was doing much more than opening a gateway; they were providing status and trust to the hotel. Moving fast to cut the doorman in favor of automation can backfire in terms of guest trust and brand reputation.

There is no question that we as an industry must embrace AI and that we must do so with speed. But we must also do it while preserving (and ideally adding to) the trust that our guests and employees place with us. 

The travel industry is faced with tough decisions to make: 

Bringing this full circle, and in the spirit of feedback, I'd love to hear how you are tackling these decisions and the five AI tensions. Any AI-related travel challenges that I’m overlooking? Let me know at [email protected].

Best,

Seth Borko

Head of Research