The impact of AI on the operations of travel companies

Phocuswright hosted the first of The New Age(nts) Trend series events online. Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation, and Robert Cole, senior research analyst for lodging and leisure, were joined by Anna Jaffe, CEO of Mobi.ai, Bobby Healy, founder and CEO of Manna and founder and non-executive director of Meili and Tim Hentschel, CEO of HotelPlanner and meetings.com.

The panelists, entrepreneurs who deeply understand artificial intelligence, are at the forefront of implementing it in their own organizations. Each offered valuable perspectives on why generative AI and autonomous agents are poised to revolutionize how travel companies operate this year.

The full overview report aims to capture the most important takeaways from the discussion and subsequent audience questions for Phocuswright subscribers. The recording is available on YouTube and embedded below.

Here are five key takeaways on how generative AI is impacting company operations:

Workforce experimentation and training

"AI fluency must be encouraged across teams today, or companies will lack the talent to manage AI-driven operations tomorrow," Healy said.

"Culturally, your starting point is to open minds, to politely force the technology to be evaluated properly. And the conclusion could be I'm redundant, or I'm a hundred times better. But if you don't do that, the defenses come up, and you will be disrupted soon enough.”

Ensure data quality

Without clean, current data and clear performance benchmarks, even the most powerful AI will produce flawed outcomes.

AI agents as a channel

Agentic AI will become a core distribution channel—forcing companies to redesign how they engage and serve customers.

New models, new perspectives

Future-ready AI must move beyond past data, adapting in real time to individual preferences and dynamic environments.

“The mistake people make with AI is to look at all athe historical data and try to infer who someone is. That’s not enough. You need to understand the traveler now, in context, not just based on past bookings,” Jaffe said.

Be informed and agile

Executives must stay educated and agile—today’s AI experiment could be tomorrow’s competitive edge (or threat).

Hentschel provided a real world examples of AI in action. He explained how the company's voice reservation agent on HotelPlanner was trained on eight million successful human calls to create 24 agent personalities that express emotional intelligence and regional accents. It is currently handling 50,000 calls per day.

“What we're trying to accomplish is max conversion for AI agents being able to get the same customer service rankings and the same conversion level as a real human agent. And we're getting closer and closer to that.”