A Booking Holdings exec said recently that paid and organic referral traffic from LLMs amount to fewer than 1% of room nights. That’s almost four years since the launch of ChatGPT. The frontier models have become important discovery platforms for travel, but that doesn’t mean online travel agency bookers showing up credit card in hand.
The major OTAs, including Booking, Expedia and Airbnb, are instead trimming costs and getting more efficient by using AI in their internal operations, from customer service to coding.
Then there are AI features, such as Vrbo’s AI Compare and Property Expert, which aren’t currently turning droves of lookers into bookers, but they may pay off in the future because they are providing valuable data on travel intent.
The situation will obviously evolve — and that’s an understatement.
Skift Creator Summit
Travel discovery is moving upstream of the search box, into creator feeds, short-form video, and group chats, and the commercial question is whether that attention becomes trusted, measurable, bookable demand.
Presented by Meta, Skift Creator Summit convenes 50 to 75 senior travel leaders in New York City on September 22 to work through the post-search funnel: attribution, platform dependency, and the path from inspiration to transaction.
CAPITAL ONE TRAVEL + SKIFT
Credit card travel programs are moving beyond points, using curation, access, and benefits to shape where premium travelers stay.
EDITOR’S PICKS
Inside Expedia’s Silicon Valley Bid for AI Talent
August 14, 2026
Expedia is taking its AI recruitment fight to the heart of Silicon Valley, with a new San Jose hub for AI and engineering just a 10-minute drive from the Googleplex. But can it court tech and AI talent away from Big Tech? Here's the pitch.
SKIFT PODCAST NETWORK
You can now open Google Maps, describe the hotel you want in plain language, and get real availability and pricing back in the same conversation. In this clip from Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast: Hotels Edition, Sarah Dandashy and Steve Turk break down what Google's new agentic AI feature inside Maps actually does, what happened when Steve tested it live asking for the best hotel in Miami Beach, and why this is a bigger threat to OTAs than most people are treating it as right now.
SKIFT TRAVEL 200
How are public travel tech companies performing around the world? The Skift Travel 200 pulls the data you need to know to understand the market. Paid subscribers get full access here.
