AI Hotel Booking: Are Travel Intermediaries at Risk?

Travel booking behavior is changing rapidly. In the past, consumers searched multiple platforms, compared prices, read reviews, and evaluated room types before confirming a reservation. Today, many travelers discover a hotel through a short video or social post, skim a few comments, and book instantly. Increasingly, users begin with a prompt to AI: “I have three days in Chengdu. Plan my trip.”

For consumers, this represents a clear efficiency upgrade. For the travel industry, it signals a deeper structural shift in who controls decision-making.

Despite strong global travel recovery, major online travel agencies such as Expedia and Traveloka continue to streamline operations. If transaction volumes are rising, why are platforms reducing distribution and operational staff?

Part of the answer lies in how decisions are being executed. At the recent HBX Group MarketHub Asia event in Bali, the focus was not consumer traffic but the B2B distribution layer. HBX Group, owner of Hotelbeds, processes roughly 7.8 billion search requests daily, connecting hotel inventory and pricing rules with global distribution channels. Its core task is not storytelling but operational logic: which products, at what prices, under what rules, can be sold by systems.

According to HBX Group’s first-quarter fiscal 2026 results, total transaction value rose 16 percent year on year to €2.023 billion. Revenue, however, grew only 5 percent, and take rates declined to about 8.4 percent. Volume is expanding faster than monetization. In Asia-Pacific, now HBX’s fastest-growing region with 20 percent TTV growth, take rates remain the lowest among its markets.

Under margin pressure, growth must come from transaction efficiency: better demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and optimized inventory allocation. AI is no longer viewed merely as a productivity tool. It is evolving into a transaction decision engine spanning pricing, distribution, matching, and fulfillment.

The real transformation is not how intelligent AI has become, but where decisions are made. In the past, travelers controlled search and comparison. Today, filtering, ranking, and itinerary assembly increasingly occur in the background before users see options.

China offers a glimpse of this future. On platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, discovery, trust building, and booking often occur within the same content ecosystem. Algorithms determine which options users ever see. The effective decision set is narrowed before a traveler chooses.

As generative AI assistants begin to plan itineraries and execute purchases directly, competition shifts. Visibility and brand strength matter less than structured data. Hotels and suppliers must ensure pricing rules, cancellation policies, and room types are machine-readable and executable in real time.

When algorithms become the buyer, success depends not on traffic alone, but on whether your product can enter and complete the system-driven transaction workflow.