What Booking Holdings and Other OTAs Still Get Wrong About Travel Agents

We’re very much in the early innings of the massive transformation that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have on the global economy, but that doesn’t mean that online travel agencies (OTAs) aren’t taking the opportunity to again declare a new replacement for human travel advisors.

In a conversation with business news organization Quartz, published on Tuesday, Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, made the argument that AI is on its way to taking the place of travel advisors, an argument that the trade has heard on repeat since the 1990s.

“What we really want is to recreate the effect of dealing with a human being,” Fogel said.

Speaking of its AI trip planner that it rolled out last July, a tool that the company invested heavily in, Fogel said that the aim is to allow its users, booking through its OTAs that include Booking.com, Priceline, and Kayak, to interact with AI to better plan their trips. That includes suggestions on trip alterations, like changing plans because of weather forecasts, or getting better pricing by changing dates. Some of those are already accessible and very much a part of trip planning processes by both consumers and the trade.

What Fogel sees as the ultimate goal is to allow users to “go back and forth just like you used to do with a human travel agent.”

I have spoken to hundreds of travel advisors over the past year, and hundreds, if not thousands more prior. There’s practically no successful travel advisor who have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to new technology.

What strikes me listening to Fogel, is that he recognizes the role “human being travel agents” have played in his own life—the interview includes him talking about “back when I was young my family would go to a human being travel agent” and that she would holistically put a multiple component trip together and be there if something went wrong.

Still, he can’t see, or is unwilling to see, that the role of advisors goes far beyond trip planning and customer service.

If all consumers wanted to automate tasks, they wouldn’t be advisor clients in the first place. There’s already a whole ecosystem designed to make booking travel painless for those consumers who simply want a transaction. Advisors have thrived as that ecosystem has grown—as Bookings has grown its revenue, the North American travel agency community has done the same, thriving post-pandemic—and they shouldn’t be fearful of how AI promises to accelerate that future growth.

What advisors should be fearful about is not embracing AI to eliminate their own pain points. There’s going to be a brave new world of automation that advisors can, and already are, taking advantage of, removing routing tasks to give advisors the time to deliver more personalized and thoughtful service.

There might be a time in the future when science fiction becomes reality and AI replaces human connections totally. That’s when travel advisors might be fearful. But for now, as humans still crave other humans, and travelers still crave expertise and connections, it would be a bad wager to bet against travel advisors.