As AI starts booking trips for travelers, OTAs face a new role
On the current 2026 TravelDaily Convention, Fliggy CTO Ye Chen shared his views in a presentation titled “Agentic Commerce and AI-native journey: How far have we come?”
In his view, as brokers start to go looking, evaluate, make selections and even full transactions on behalf of vacationers, the journey business’s conventional visitors gateways, transaction fashions and working fashions can even change.
For the lodge business, a extra speedy query is rising:
As vacationers more and more depend on AI as a substitute of looking on their very own, how will accommodations get found?
Conventional search assumes that customers have a reasonably clear concept of what they’re in search of. However many journey wants are troublesome to seize with just some key phrases.
That is exactly the place AI brokers are altering the method. As a substitute of coming into fragmented search phrases, vacationers can describe their wants in pure language. AI can then break these wants down into locations, dates, budgets, preferences and itineraries, and name on totally different companies, together with accommodations, flights, transportation and journey experiences, to show “the place I need to go” into an executable journey plan.
Fliggy has already embedded AI capabilities into the journey expertise. Its AI-native utility, “Fliggy Bangbang,” covers the journey from journey inspiration and itinerary planning to reserving and post-trip companies. Customers may even give the AI a journey itinerary or advice publish from a social media platform and ask it to show the content material into a personalised journey plan that may truly be booked and executed.
OTAs have historically targeted on “providing you with extra decisions.” AI, however, may very well be about “making these decisions for you.”
However why would AI advocate your lodge to a traveler?
The reply goes past visitors. The accuracy of real-time stock, pricing flexibility, completeness of product info, readability of cancellation insurance policies, and whether or not service capabilities might be recognized and accessed by AI may all grow to be elements within the agent’s decision-making course of.
The affect of AI may transcend merely diverting visitors away from OTAs. Chen believes AI may generate new journey demand: long-tail wants that beforehand went unsearched or have been too troublesome to articulate may enter the transaction market as AI lowers the price of journey decision-making.
Search just isn’t disappearing. The demand behind it may truly develop.
For accommodations, this can be extra necessary than merely asking whether or not the “visitors gateway has modified.”
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