Rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing the travel industry and how companies operate both externally and internally.
For the past several weeks, PhocusWire has been checking in with executives about where AI is making the biggest difference in their businesses. Carsten Bernhard, CTO of eDreams Odigeo, spoke with us for the latest installment, providing insight into the online travel agency’s approach to new technology.
The OTA has been actively integrating AI, including the launch of a proprietary AI trip planning feature and a ChatGPT app in April. This week, it also announced that a partnership with Amazon to become a travel booking provider inside Alexa+, its generative AI assistant. With the integration, travelers can find and book flights, hotels and car rentals via voice.
Below, Bernhard shares his thoughts on the evolution of AI, agentic travel and more.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for style, clarity and length.
What's the biggest impact AI has had on your organization so far? Please provide a concrete example of AI in action.
We haven't simply bolted AI onto an existing system but started building it into the platform from the ground up as early as 2015. Rather than deploying isolated AI tools, eDreams has embedded AI across customer service, pricing, marketing and software development, creating a scalable competitive advantage that improves customer outcomes while accelerating growth and productivity.
Today, AI makes over 6 billion predictions and decisions every day, deciding what to show a traveler, how to price a fare and how to route a support query.
Our AI voice assistant, for example, is connected directly to our own booking and fulfilment engine, so it can rebook a flight or process a refund without human input on our side. It resolves around 90% of inbound customer calls automatically, cutting transfers by a third, speeding resolution by 15%, and lowering service costs by 13%. That combination of intelligence and execution is where we've seen the biggest shift in how the business runs day to day.
How do you see AI evolving?
In the short term, we'll see AI increasingly used for journey planning, people describing a trip to an LLM rather than starting from a destination. For us, this presents another acquisition channel feeding into our platform.
The longer-term shift is more complex. Booking travel looks simple from the outside because decades of investment have made it feel that way. However, behind every confirmed itinerary sits a dense web of supplier rules, licensing regimes, payment obligations and consumer protections.
Sourcing trips requires IATA-linked licensing and accreditation. Taking payment means carrying merchant risk and providing financial guarantees. Regulatory frameworks such as ATOL in the U.K. and the EU Package Travel Directive set rigorous standards for consumer protection. And once the trip is sold, the responsibility has only started: schedule changes, refund management, exchanges and round-the-clock support at high volume. Discovery can be reinvented in months; fulfilment takes decades to build.
Trivago recently said it increased its investment in internal AI tools more than fivefold in the first seven months of 2026. How does your AI investment compare?
We do not benchmark ourselves against short-term spending spikes because our position comes from a different starting point. As I mentioned, we began building our own AI research and platform capability in 2015, over a decade of continuous investment. We've seen engineering innovation speed increase fivefold, while productivity is up 47% year on year, with the most advanced teams now generating 100% of new code through AI under human oversight.
We have also doubled our learning and development investment to keep our employees AI literate at every level. Our investment has therefore been built over a much longer period, rather than concentrated in a recent ramp-up.
What role do you see agentic AI playing in the airline distribution industry?
Agentic AI will increasingly become another way for travelers to discover and book flights. What we’ve learned is that discovery is only part of the challenge. The more difficult part is executing the booking.
Travel is a complex transaction, with billions of fare combinations, around 3 billion price changes every month, multi-carrier itineraries and different ticketing rules. Once a booking is made, someone also needs to manage changes, cancellations, refunds and customer support.
That is why we see agentic AI as another front door into specialized travel infrastructure, rather than a replacement for it. The AI agent can understand the traveler’s intent, while the booking platform handles the complexity of fares, payments, fulfilment, protection and servicing. The opportunity is to connect those layers so AI can move from helping someone discover a trip to completing and supporting it.
How has AI changed eDreams' recruitment strategy?
AI has significantly transformed our recruitment, not just in the obvious way of helping managers process thousands of applications but in the type of people we're now looking for. The skills we're looking for are changing.
With AI embedded more deeply in our engineering processes, we increasingly need people who can direct and assess AI-generated systems, not simply build software line by line. That shift is reflected in demand as we received over 40,000 applications last year for just 400 roles, an acceptance rate of around 1%. Candidates are drawn by genuine technical scale, not a travel brand hiring for operational roles.
What other technological innovations are you exploring beyond AI?
It's important to understand that AI is just one piece of the technology puzzle. A lot of our innovation is about connecting travel to where customers are and making sure the infrastructure behind a booking works flawlessly.
We've recently partnered with BBVA Digital Banks, embedding Prime travel benefits directly into their banking app in Germany and Italy, so travel becomes part of a customer's everyday financial life. We've also partnered with Visa to strengthen payment security and verification across our platforms, ensuring every transaction, however it's initiated, is genuinely trusted and protected.
Alongside these partnerships, we invest heavily in the unglamorous infrastructure that makes travel actually work, managing search demand at scale, handling merchant payment flows and refunds reliably and maintaining the licensing and financial guarantees needed to operate safely across 44 markets. These may not make headlines like AI does, but they're just as essential to a seamless trip.
Stay tuned for additional interviews with chief AI officers, e-commerce execs and CTOs as part of PhocusWire's ongoing AI Transformation in Travel series. Catch up on previous conversations with Ante Dagelić of Travelier, Velit Dundar of Radisson, Javier Cabrerizo of HBX Group, Piero Sierra of Skyscanner, and Andrew Jordan of Travelport, and Kara Franker of Visit Florida Keys & Key West.