Travel's path toward agentic artificial intelligence looks rocky, and the industry's own marketing leaders admit it. At Phocuswright's Travel Marketing AI Summit in London last week, Travelier CMO Mario Gavira told senior executives that the sector's readiness for AI agents is dismal - around 20% according to Cloudflare's Agent Readiness scores - and that the industry does not know how to handle the shift.
"Travel is around 20% agentic. Basically, we are nowhere from an agentic point of view, and the reason we are nowhere is because we don't really know how it's going to work out," Gavira said. "Do we actually want to allow agents to be the front store of our retail experience? And second, are we able to even track it and control it? The answer is we don't really know."
The stakes are rising. Phocuswright research shows 40% of U.S. travelers and 28% of U.K. travelers are willing to let an AI assistant book flights and hotels. Yet during the summit, a moderator asked the audience to signal whether they had completed an end-to-end booking using AI. One person raised a card.
The trust gap and simple itineraries
Piero Sierra, chief AI officer at Skyscanner, said travel's move toward agentic booking is "inevitable" but will lag behind other industries. "Travel's very hard. It's personal, it's expensive," he said. Sierra predicted that AI agents will handle simple, low-cost bookings first, while complex family vacations remain out of reach.
"The scenario that's always shown in the demos is 'I want a five-star vacation somewhere exotic. I have three kids, please plan it for me and here's my credit card.' That's not going to work from a complexity perspective, but I also think travelers enjoy travel planning. The trust gap is so great that I think it's not going to be ever surmounted except for the simplest kind of itineraries," he said.
SEO gives way to GEO
Panelists spent considerable time on the shift from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization (GEO). B2B AI specialist Demand-Genius has studied how AI cites brands across the buyer journey and found a stark pattern: AI does not retrieve or cite brands during awareness and consideration stages.
"AI doesn't go to retrieval until it gets to conversion. If you look at the retrieval rate, the citation rate, the mention rate of brands, it's 0% at awareness and consideration because AI is not a directory," said CEO and co-founder Tom Rudnai. "That's the fundamental difference between [AI] and Google. It has no interest in linking off to your site unless it serves the user's intent."
Rudnai warned against optimizing for prompts as if they were keywords. Modern AI uses a technique called query fanout, breaking a prompt like "best Paris hotel" into sub-queries that might include Palace Status holders, Sawday's top 10 lists, or popular business hotels in La Defense. This makes travel GEO harder to manipulate than in simpler product categories. "Your purchasing journey for buying toothpaste is: 'I ran out of toothpaste. What toothpaste should I buy?' So yes, then it's SEO," Rudnai said. Travel is not toothpaste.
Gavira compared GEO to the winner-take-all dynamic in The Hunger Games. "You need to first be able to make the cut of being part of the shortlist of the LLM to actually be part of the answer. Then you need to shape the opinion of the LLM with all of your content strategy, not just on site but especially on third-party sites," he said. He also noted a critical data gap: unlike Google Search Console and Keyword Planner for SEO, there is no source of truth for prompt volume in large language models.
Brand spend as the real moat
Gavira said search is becoming a branding channel, not a direct performance channel. "99.5% of people who see responses in chatbots will not click on any link, so you cannot track it. It becomes branding. You need to be able to build an attribution model that allows you to have confidence in the investment."
Sierra reinforced the point, calling brand investment one of the best ways to build a defensive moat in an AI-driven search environment. He cautioned that marketers often misattribute visibility gains: they credit tactical GEO work when the real driver is overall brand spending improving their digital footprint. "AI is actually a reflection of your brand and reputation across all your digital footprint and a really intelligent version of that," he said.
Smaller brands are not locked out, Rudnai added, but they must be far more strategic. "If you want to get a foothold in any form of search, it's about being very strategic with where you start, the specific types of customers that you're going after and the specific channels because it's fragmented so much. If you're a big player, you can drown every one of the sources that AI reads with information about your brand. As a small brand, you don't necessarily have that." The approach requires picking a channel and pushing resources into it with precision, he said.
Why this matters for marketing professionals
Travel marketers face a dual challenge that will soon spread to other sectors. First, they must accept that AI-driven search is not a traffic channel - it is a branding channel where attribution is murky and click-through rates are near zero. Second, GEO demands a fundamentally different playbook than SEO. There is no keyword volume data to guide content strategy, and AI's query fanout means surface-level prompt optimization will fail. The marketers who succeed will treat AI visibility as a brand reputation problem, invest accordingly, and build measurement models that do not depend on clicks.
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