The Future of Travel

Trust in AI-generated recommendations remains a work in progress. While AI is becoming increasingly visible across search, planning, and customer service, most travelers remain skeptical. More than half (54%) of consumers distrust AI recommendations, with distrust particularly pronounced among Boomers and Gen X. Gen Z stands apart, exhibiting the highest levels of trust and signaling where broader consumer sentiment may eventually head.

The findings suggest that adoption and trust are advancing at different speeds. Travelers are becoming accustomed to AI-enabled experiences, but confidence depends on whether those experiences feel accurate, relevant, and transparent. Younger generations appear more willing to embrace AI, while older travelers continue to place greater value on familiarity and human oversight.

For travel brands, this creates an opportunity to use AI less as a visible feature and more as an intelligence layer that improves experiences behind the scenes. The winners will be those that combine rich customer identity, behavioral data, and adaptive decisioning to deliver recommendations that feel timely and helpful rather than automated for automation's sake.

Travelers are not looking to hand over the entire planning process to AI. Instead, they are embracing AI selectively, gravitating toward practical tasks that reduce effort and simplify decision-making. Comparing hotels, flights, and packages is the most widely accepted use case, followed by finding activities and generating destination ideas. Comfort declines considerably when decisions become more consequential, with relatively few travelers willing to rely on AI for rebooking or itinerary changes.

Generational differences reveal how AI adoption is evolving. Gen X travelers are particularly receptive to using AI for activity discovery, while Gen Z demonstrates greater openness to budgeting, customer service, and trip management. These patterns suggest that consumers are not seeking full automation. Rather, they are defining clear boundaries around where AI creates value and where human expertise still matters.

For travel brands, the opportunity lies in deploying AI where it removes friction and enhances discovery. The greatest impact may come not from replacing existing experiences, but from using AI and behavioral intelligence to create more responsive and personalized journeys across channels.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded throughout travel discovery and planning, accuracy is emerging as the next major challenge. While nearly half of travelers say they have never received an inaccurate or irrelevant recommendation, experiences vary considerably by generation. Younger travelers are significantly more likely to report poor recommendations, likely reflecting both higher usage and higher expectations, while older travelers encounter fewer issues, suggesting more limited adoption.

The findings highlight an important distinction: AI adoption alone does not create trust. As consumers interact with AI more frequently, expectations around relevance and precision rise. Gen Z's higher incidence of poor experiences may signal that the next phase of AI maturity will be determined less by access and more by quality.

For travel brands, the opportunity lies in turning behavioral intelligence into marketing intelligence. Rich identity and real-time signals enable brands to move beyond generic recommendations and deliver experiences that adapt to traveler intent. As AI decisioning becomes more sophisticated, relevance, not novelty will increasingly define customer trust and long-term loyalty.

As AI expands across digital experiences, consumers are signaling that enthusiasm has limits. Nearly half of travelers report feeling overwhelmed by the growing presence of AI, making fatigue the dominant sentiment. Yet these findings should not be interpreted as resistance to AI itself. Rather, travelers appear to be rejecting experiences that feel excessive, irrelevant, or unnecessarily complex.

Perhaps the most intriguing dynamic is among Millennials. They are both among the most receptive generations to AI and the most fatigued by its proliferation. Their familiarity with digital experiences appears to have raised expectations around usefulness and relevance. In many ways, Millennials are emerging as both AI power users and its toughest critics.

For travel brands, the message is clear: consumers do not want more AI—they want better AI. The winners will not be the brands that add AI to every interaction, but those that use intelligence selectively to remove friction and create experiences that feel seamless rather than intrusive.

Travel discovery is becoming increasingly fragmented. While friends and family remain the largest source of inspiration overall, travelers now move fluidly between search engines, social platforms, creators, AI assistants, and brand-owned channels. Rather than replacing one another, these channels increasingly work together, creating a more dynamic and nonlinear path to purchase.

One of the most striking findings is the consistency of travel brand websites and apps. Roughly one-third of every generation uses owned digital properties for inspiration, making them one of the few channels that transcend age differences. Meanwhile, AI-powered discovery reveals a different pattern. Millennials have emerged as the bridge generation, embracing search, social media, influencers, and AI tools simultaneously. Gen Z's lower AI usage relative to Millennials likely reflects their stronger reliance on social platforms and creator-driven content, while older travelers continue to lean on search and personal recommendations.

As conversational search and AI assistants gain adoption, discovery will become increasingly distributed. The challenge for travel brands is ensuring that every source of inspiration ultimately leads travelers back into owned experiences where identity, behavioral intelligence, and personalization can drive stronger direct relationships.

Despite the rise of mobile and social platforms, email remains the most effective channel for capturing travelers' attention. Nearly four in ten travelers say email is most likely to get their attention—more than three times the response for any other channel. Preferences, however, vary by generation. Boomers and Millennials show the strongest affinity for email, while Gen Z is more responsive to push notifications and social media advertising. Older generations are also more likely to tune out brand outreach altogether.

Attention is not confined to outbound channels. Alongside email and SMS, travelers continue to engage when they return to a brand's website or app. These touchpoints should not be viewed independently. Increasingly, they form part of an interconnected ecosystem powered by identity. By recognizing travelers across sessions, devices, and channels, brands can orchestrate email, SMS, onsite experiences, and mobile interactions as a single journey rather than a collection of separate campaigns.

The result is a shift from channel-centric marketing to customer-centric engagement. In this model, channel selection becomes dynamic, enabling brands to meet travelers where they are with the right message, at the right time, on the right device.

Despite the growth of online travel agencies and metasearch platforms, direct relationships remain remarkably resilient. Nearly half of travelers complete bookings directly through a brand's website or app, making owned channels the preferred point of purchase. However, the journey to that booking is becoming increasingly fragmented.

Millennials exhibit the most diverse behaviors, splitting attention between direct channels, OTAs, and comparison platforms, while Boomers continue to demonstrate the greatest reliance on travel advisors and human expertise. Gen Z combines strong direct-booking tendencies with a willingness to explore alternative channels, suggesting convenience matters more than loyalty to any single platform.

These findings reinforce an important reality: travelers may research across many channels, but they still prefer to transact directly with brands they trust. The challenge is that most of this activity occurs across disconnected sessions, devices, and touchpoints. Without a persistent identity layer, high-intent travelers often disappear into anonymous traffic, only to reappear on OTAs or competitor sites.

The opportunity for travel brands is not simply to drive more traffic, but to recognize more travelers. Identity transforms fragmented journeys into connected relationships, enabling brands to engage consumers across channels and ultimately capture more high-margin direct bookings.

Price has traditionally been viewed as the primary driver of direct bookings, but travelers increasingly value something more fundamental: convenience and trust. Across all generations, ease of booking is the leading factor influencing consumers to book directly, narrowly surpassing price and ranking ahead of loyalty rewards and brand trust. Gen Z places especially high importance on simplicity, while Gen X demonstrates the strongest affinity for trust and loyalty programs. Boomers continue to value customer service and exclusive perks, underscoring the enduring importance of human-centric experiences.

Perhaps the most revealing finding is what consumers do not prioritize. Fewer than one in five travelers cite personalized offers as a reason to book directly. This suggests that consumers value the outcomes of personalization more than personalization itself. Travelers are rewarding brands that make experiences simpler, faster, and more relevant, regardless of whether those experiences are explicitly marketed as personalized.

For travel brands, this represents an opportunity to compete on experience rather than price. Identity and AI decisioning can quietly deliver more relevant offers, upgrades, and recommendations behind the scenes, transforming direct channels into smarter, more intuitive experiences that create long-term loyalty and higher customer lifetime value.

As travel brands pursue increasingly personalized experiences, consumers remain divided on the value exchange required to enable them. Overall, travelers are slightly more uncomfortable sharing personal data than they are comfortable doing so, underscoring the delicate balance between personalization and privacy. Yet attitudes vary considerably across generations. Gen Z is the most receptive to exchanging data for better experiences, while Millennials—despite being among the heaviest users of digital channels and AI-powered tools—are the most reluctant.

This tension reveals an important reality: travelers do not necessarily value personalization as a concept. They value the outcomes it produces. Convenience, relevance, and simplicity matter far more than whether an experience is labeled "personalized." Millennials' skepticism suggests that digital maturity may raise expectations around transparency and trust, rather than automatically increasing willingness to share information.

For travel brands, the challenge is not convincing consumers that personalization matters. It is proving that sharing data results in experiences that are demonstrably better. Identity should not be viewed as a mechanism for collecting more data, but as the infrastructure that enables brands to create more intelligent, connected, and customer-centric experiences.

Despite rapid advances in AI and automation, travelers continue to place a premium on human interaction when decisions become complex, expensive, or emotionally charged. Billing issues, cancellations, disruptions, and high-value bookings consistently rank among the moments where consumers most strongly prefer human support. While Gen Z is more comfortable with automation than older generations, even younger travelers continue to value empathy and expertise when uncertainty enters the journey.

These findings suggest that the future of travel experiences is not fully automated. Rather, it will be defined by the combination of intelligent systems and human reassurance. Travelers want efficiency when tasks are straightforward, but they still expect empathy when the stakes are high. The strongest brands will not frame AI and people as competing forces. Instead, they will design experiences where each complements the other.

As AI capabilities mature, automation should increasingly operate as an invisible layer that removes friction, anticipates needs, and accelerates resolution. Human expertise, meanwhile, becomes even more valuable during moments that require trust, judgment, and emotional intelligence.

Travel disruptions reveal a clear generational divide in what travelers value most when plans go wrong. Overall, fast access to a real person (25%) emerged as the top priority, particularly among Boomers (29%) and Gen X (30%), underscoring the continued importance of human assistance during stressful and complex situations.

Millennials exhibit more balanced preferences, valuing both human support and digital convenience. They rank accurate updates in real time (20%), fast access to a representative (25%), and self-service tools (19%) highly, suggesting an expectation that brands deliver both efficiency and transparency.

Gen Z stands apart, with accurate updates in real time (33%) representing their highest priority. This generation is less dependent on speaking with an agent and more focused on receiving immediate, trustworthy information and having access to digital tools that help them manage disruptions independently.

Across all age groups, travelers prioritize rapid resolution and clear information over empathy alone. The findings suggest that the strongest disruption experiences will combine intelligent self-service capabilities, real-time communications, and seamless escalation to human support when complexity or emotional stress increases.