Travel payments are facing a massive overhaul with agentic capabilities—perhaps the largest since e-commerce—as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, end-to-end travel booking nears.
During a center stage session at The Phocuswright Conference, Gloria Colgan, SVP and global head of product of commercial solutions for Visa, Clara Liang, head of global strategic operations for Stripe, and Jennifer Watkins, director of payments for ARC, shared advice for companies as they prepare for the agentic shift.
According to Liang, jumping in is a good first step.
“If you're not already engaged in the conversation, thinking about how you're going to play in this world, I’d encourage you to get involved now,” she said. “Be a nerd yourself and play with the technologies.”
Visa’s Colgan agreed, suggesting that industry players try out agentic tools in their personal lives and within their professional teams before deciding how and where to deploy the technology.
Colgan also stressed the importance of partnerships.
“The second piece I'd say is really important is interoperability and standards,” Colgan said. “[Working with] with vendors and partners that can be interoperable and open gives you more flexibility than things that might be more of closed loop, walled-gardens where you're making more of a bet and things are changing pretty rapidly.”
In light of the challenges online travel agencies faced when e-commerce was first introduced, Watkins also stressed the need to prioritize payments.
“Payments were really messy because no one had thought about that part. It was like, ‘Oh, we're gonna sell our stuff online.’ Payment was an afterthought. So, I guess my only advice would be to bring that into the conversation early as you're rolling out your strategy for agentic commerce.”
The conversation touched on new protocols from OpenAI, Stripe and Visa, airlines’ retailing practices and more.
Watch the full session moderated by Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation for Phocuswright, below.
Executive panel: AI Agents, Real Transactions - The New Travel Economy