In film and other media, AI has been somewhat of an obsession for decades now. Will it condemn humans to oblivion? Will it remind us what it actually means to be human? Will it integrate to create a utopia?
The travel industry is now grappling with these same questions, as hoteliers wonder what the future holds now that AI has firmly embedded itself in the lives of travellers and the operations of hospitality businesses.
In parts one and two of this series, we discussed what’s happening right now, but just how far can it all go and what are the implications?
A future that once felt like science fiction is basically already here, a future where humans barely need to interact at all. Instead of hopping online to research and book a trip (maybe even make a call), a traveller might simply instruct their AI agent to do it all for them – and it will do so by communicating not with the hotelier or airline, but with their own respective AI agents.
In a matter of minutes, multiple AI agents have organised an entire trip including hotel booking, flights, airport transfers or car rental, packages, activity schedules, and personalised preferences like room temperature and beverages in the minibar.
This is no longer a thought experiment. The infrastructure is being built by some of the world’s most powerful companies and hoteliers are asking what the endgame is. Is there a stable future-state or will our industry be in constant flux?
Welcome to the third and final part of our series, where we examine what the future might look like as AI capabilities continue to expand and AI adoption continues to grow across the globe.
AI is already transitioning from search assistant to autonomous booker
Earlier in our series we discussed how travellers are using AI to ‘discover’ hotels, but a shift has already occurred and AI is now able to ‘act’ on behalf of users. It’s known as agentic AI.
In early 2026, Sabre, PayPal, and MindTrip announced a partnership to build what they describe as the travel industry’s first end-to-end agentic AI booking system. A traveller describes their trip in natural language. The AI queries real-time inventory across more than 420 airlines and two million hotel properties. PayPal’s commerce infrastructure handles payment without the traveller ever leaving the conversation. This potentially creates the most seamless search, booking, and payment process that travellers have ever experienced.
Meanwhile, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano revealed in February that the hotel giant is building an integration to process bookings directly through Google’s AI Mode.
There are other stories like these too, such as SiteMinder’s own AI distribution offering which connects hoteliers to the AI booking platforms that travellers are already using to organise their stays.
“As AI-driven hotel discovery accelerates, we are expanding Demand Plus and Channels Plus to give properties on our platform new ways to be found and convert demand across these emerging pathways. For hoteliers, that means being present and bookable at every new point of discovery, and that advantage will only grow,” says Sankar Narayan, CEO and Managing Director at SiteMinder.
These signals all conform that the booking funnel is set to become much more compressed compared to what hoteliers have been used to in the past.
The floodgates are close to opening, but more trust is needed
While momentum for agentic AI and all its capabilities is strong, most travellers still want to maintain control over their trip planning for now.
According to McKinsey and Skift Research, only 2% of travellers are currently willing to give an AI tool full autonomy to make and modify bookings without human oversight. With so much investment betting on the opposite, it’s a statistic that may ring warning bells for some.
Gareth Williams, co-founder of Skyscanner, raised a similar point in an interview with Skift, mentioning that the general public has a much more negative view towards AI than those within the industry.
This is a pattern we’ve seen throughout our series as well. In part one, Mike Godfrey, a vastly experienced hotel and car rental revenue manager, admitted he didn’t initially trust the speed and output of AI tools. In part two, Benjamin Verot, Founder and Managing Director of HotelMinder and Lobby, said he wouldn’t recommend actions to hoteliers unless he could promise good ROI – and that return isn’t there for AI-driven guest acquisition just yet.
What this tells us is that technology is currently outpacing the comfort levels of consumers, though this is not a unique situation. History has plenty of similar examples including the elevator, AC power, automobiles, microwaves, and even credit cards.
Nevertheless, AI still has a clear trajectory and travellers will come around eventually. The sooner hoteliers lean into the new technology opening up opportunities for them, the better. Jordan Hollander, co-founder of HotelTechReport, says it best:
“The hotels that buy software based on data will outperform those that buy on instinct. The gap is already opening.”
For hoteliers, the time to prepare and act is now. It’s not a question of whether agentic booking will eventually become commonplace, but whether accommodation providers will be ready when it does.
Predictive analytics are the real opportunity for hoteliers
As we mentioned in part one, the greatest potential for AI in hospitality lies not in chatbots or content generators, but in the ability to process and learn from enormous volumes of data such as booking patterns, guest demographics, market conditions, competitor pricing, weather, local events, flight schedules, and more, to produce insights that would otherwise take humans weeks or months to compile and analyse.
Mike Rogers, Chief Data Officer at SiteMinder, has been vocal about this distinction.
“Most people see AI as LLMs and GenAI – this is where a lot of exciting, fun and cool ideas are emerging. But in terms of impact on productivity, efficiency, and innovation, predictive modelling and machine learning can be far more powerful. The latter are seen as unsexy, but this is where the real value happens.”
With predictive AI, a hotelier will be able to identify when a guest is likely to cancel a reservation, and then determine the best intervention to prevent that cancellation. Or compare a property’s rates, reservations, and guest demographics against competitor hotels to surfacing opportunities to capture more bookings.
These use cases are being actively developed by platforms like SiteMinder, powered by its AI engine SiteMinder iQ, and underpinned by data from more than 53,000 hotel customers and over 130 million reservations annually across the world.
The 2026 Hospitality Industry Outlook from Mews, compiled from the perspectives of eighteen industry experts, puts it starkly: by 2035, the majority of routine back-office tasks in hotels are expected to be automated. Human staff will be left to create emotional, high-impact moments with guests, presenting a future where people have the freedom to be more present.
Transformation is coming to the hotel industry but the human touch will remain
Right now, for most hotels, the customer journey begins with a booking on a website and ends with a farewell at reception. Perhaps there’s a follow-up email or a voucher for a local restaurant left at the front desk.
True transformation means recognising that the guest is still a guest when they’re scrolling social media, searching for their next flight, reading reviews, or messaging a restaurant near their hotel. AI has the capacity to connect these dots.
So if AI can write emails, manage pricing, predict demand, handle complaints, and even complete bookings, what’s left for the people? Reassuringly, the answer is ‘all the good stuff.’
Leon Pink, General Manager at VOMO Island Fiji, expressed it clearly in part one of this series.
“We always want to maintain that personalised, heartfelt, luxury – the human touch and connection with our guests. Fiji is everything the world isn’t anymore. Everybody’s trying to escape the world to have lovely experiences here that feel real and meaningful.”
Tom Varsavsky, Chief Technology Officer at SiteMinder, also articulates the beauty of this balance from a tech leader’s perspective.
“There is a magic that comes from high-functioning and collaborative teams. The skills they have built over years, as well as their historical knowledge of the business and customers, is priceless. AI cannot replace this magic, though it can accelerate a high-performing team’s outcomes, innovation, and capabilities.”
Moving from crossroads to a central path
We created this series to do exactly what the title says; explore. We wanted to know exactly how hoteliers were thinking about the emergence of AI capabilities and how it was changing the behaviours of travellers.
We discovered that the industry was at a genuine crossroads, with curiosity and suspicion combining to frame both risks and opportunities.
Even in just the past few months though, the picture is changing. There is more certainty about the fact that AI will change the hospitality industry – and how.
The challenge for hoteliers will be to understand the best practices that will put them on the quickest path to success. Managing revenue, allocating resources, analysing insights, and creating experiences might all look a little different moving forward.
But the things that make a hotel great and a stay truly memorable will be the same. The feeling of being known, cared for, catered too will always resonate with guests, no matter what. AI simply has the potential to make it all easier, for those who embrace it strategically.
Thank you for accompanying us on this journey. If you missed parts one and two, be sure to check them via the links in this article.
