With such a rapid evolution, questions swirl around what travel marketing’s future looks like: How will visibility change? How will advertising work on AI platforms? Will AI overshadow social media marketing in the age of the influencer?
Executives from major players including Hopper, Marriott, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Google touched on those questions and more at Phocuswright’s Travel Marketing AI Summit.
Despite diverging views on the best path forward, stakeholders agreed: AI is no longer a peripheral tool, but a force impacting the marketing landscape.
How much is AI changing travel marketing?
Frederic Lalonde, founder and CEO of Hopper, offered a burn-it-all-down perspective on AI and traditional marketing. He predicted “Google search is going away” and customer engagement is likely to change.
“I think we have to fundamentally accept that all marketing channels are gone, and you're going to have to rethink everything you do,” Lalonde said.
The Hopper CEO said that traffic from Google won’t be replaced by Gemini or by ChatGPT, adding linking will be a thing of the past. “That's going to wipe out a whole bunch of marketplaces.”
Right now, Lalonde said executives anticipate that when something is sold to a customer, the customer is present 100% of the time. He said he predicts that number will drop significantly in the coming year.
“What happens to the world when 50% of what's sold on a travel site, there's nobody there to buy it?” Lalonde said. “They didn't see the brand, they didn't see the flow, they didn't see the advertising.”
What happens to marketing if a human isn’t involved? Lalonde asked.
On the flip side, Ben Harrell, managing director of Booking.com, said AI hasn’t altered how the company thinks about marketing “at all.”
“We are always trying to be where consumers and travelers are. We want to be there on every platform,” he said.
Companies including Google and Marriott are adapting to AI’s break-neck pace of development but don’t see a complete crumbling of current marketing practices.
“We couldn't be having the type of conversations we're having today a year ago,” said Nelson Boyce, managing director of travel for Google. “We couldn't have the type of conversations that we're having today six months ago.”
What’s happening with AI now is going to shape the future, according to Drew Pinto, executive vice president and chief revenue and technology officer for Marriott International.
Pinto compared what’s happening to the dot-com era. AI is just as transformational, he said, noting it’s touching every piece of our lives.
AI search, advertising
Travel companies are focused on boosting visibility as more consumers rely on AI, with 56% in the U.S. using AI for travel, according to Phocuswright Research. As a result, brands are working to improve generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO)—and search engine optimization (SEO) still matters, too.
Google isn’t nixing its core search business, but it is testing and scaling across its ecosystem to meet evolving user needs, Boyce said.
“We have a number of different things happening at the same time in order to try to figure out the best combination,” Boyce said.
And travel companies are taking steps to fit into a generative search environment.
Marriott is taking a multi-step approach, according to Pinto.
“Number one, you [have] to get in technical speed, right? You [have] to get your data layer right,” he said. “But two is, how do you then distribute that data?”
Marriott is working on that with partners to make sure its data is good and to ensure distribution capability.
“With the AI providers, we've launched an effort around generative optimization,” Pinto said. “So just like we have SEO efforts, we're also working on GEO to make sure that the indexing and the discoverability with the models is really strong.”
Hari Nair, SVP and general manager of Hotels.com, said everything needs to be optimized for natural language as search becomes conversational.
“When you think about conversations, it is starting in all kinds of formats and surfaces,” Nair said, pointing to conversations on a browser, in an inbox or with an AI assistant.
Because optimization is different for each service, the situation is complex, according to Nair.
Boyce said he can’t underscore enough that first-party data curation and cultivation needs to be prioritized.
“Your data stream as a function of that is also very important. Your technical readiness is also very important.”
But the AI revolution doesn’t mean every company’s strategy needs an overhaul.
“I don't think it changes the core of what folks need to do or what they've ultimately been doing,” Boyce said of fitting into Google’s AI efforts.
Organic search is not all that travel brands need to consider.
OpenAI started testing ads in February and said last week that “early results were encouraging,” with plans to expand beyond the U.S. in coming weeks. And Google has said ads are not out of the question for Gemini.
“Being able to participate in the ad spaces is also going to matter,” Harrell said. “It changes. It changed when mobile became readjusted, we adapted. It will change again as gen AI becomes more and more pervasive, and it will change how we go about things, but overall strategy doesn't change.”
Hotels.com is also hoping to hop on the AI advertising train. “We want to make sure that we are in the game,” Nair said.
Will AI kill influencing?
Social media influencers will likely be rendered obsolete with AI’s rise, according to Harrell.
“Already today, if you ask people, they trust generative AI models more than they trust social media influencers,” Harrell said. “That's a change in … just over a year, and those numbers are skewing more and more.”
But there are different ways to market on social media without traditional influencers. Authenticity is emerging as a marketing draw on social media, according to Michelle Vincent, CEO of Magnet Media.
Vincent said she’s seeing companies try to cut through the noise by putting their own players in front of the camera.
“We're seeing a lot more executive-generated content,” she said. “A lot of experimentation with really trying to bring authenticity to the storytelling.”
But not everyone agrees that influencing as we think of it today could be on its way out.
Travis Pittman, co-founder and CEO of TourRadar, said his company has gone “all in” on influencers.
“Influencers are an amazing way of reaching audiences that you can't really access, and the trust that that builds is massive,” he said.
Christine Petersen, CEO of Savanta, agreed influencers will remain important in the coming years.
But she couched her take. “It's the quality of what they're doing—the quality of the content and the authenticity—that is still going to be key.”
AI and the future of travel marketing
With company after company self-identifying as “AI-native”, hype is playing a role that can’t be ignored.
“There's so much opportunity,” Pinto said. “I also think … there is so much hyperbole out there, and there are so many things that people are claiming that may not come true, but ... what it does is it moves the ball forward.”
Some players are pulling ahead now as every company steps into the race to invest in AI. But frontrunners won’t necessarily come out as the winners in AI marketing—or at all.
Pinto reflected as he looked ahead: Coming out of business school in 2000, Pinto was working as a consultant with JCPenney. At the time, he said they were a top 10 e-commerce retail site.
“They were one of the strongest internet players at the time,” Pinto said, referencing what’s happened to the retail giant since—they filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
It goes to show success isn’t predetermined, Pinto said.
And in the retail environment other changes were expected with the rise of the internet that didn’t come to fruition.
“There were claims in the room, including from some of our partners, that brick and mortar was dead, that we'd never see stores again,” Pinto said. “And for retailers, this was an existential threat. Of course, that didn't happen.”
Though no one can predict the future, as companies consider how to move forward, experimentation will be key for marketers.
“There [are] going to be crazy opportunities, because there's been this hegemony of Expedia, Booking and Google … that [stabilizes] the market,” Lalonde said. “But you'll be able to grow your startup, your brands in much more effective ways if you're ahead of this … try to figure this out, because it's very, very real.”
Meanwhile, Nair said he would recommend focusing on “useful AI” versus what he called “novel AI.”
“I think most companies who are making an impact are not trying to do this from a standpoint of gimmicks,” he said. '
Tags: Travel marketing artificial intelligence Hopper, Marriott, Booking.com, Hotels.com Google Christine Petersen, Savanta Michelle Vincent, Magnet Media Phocuswright’s Travel Marketing AI Summit. Drew Pinto
