AI excitement is highest in Asia. Trust to let it book is lowest.
Booking.com's own data shows the platform best placed to win AI booking is pacing itself to a trust gap it can't rush
Driving the news. At WiT Japan, Booking.com's regional director for North and South Asia Pacific, Nuno Guerreiro, put a figure on a gap the platform has more reason than anyone to want closed: the travelers most excited about AI are among the least willing to let it book. For an industry treating AI-mediated booking as the next battleground, the read from the platform best positioned to win it is a signal about how fast that future actually arrives.
The inversion. The numbers come from Booking.com's own Global AI Sentiment Report, drawn from 37,000 consumers across 33 markets. Globally, 91% say they are excited about AI and 89% want to use it to plan travel — but only 6% fully trust it, and just 12% are comfortable letting it decide without a human in the loop. Asia Pacific runs hottest on enthusiasm (95%) and coolest on trust (8% fully trust it). Excitement and trust have come apart, and the gap is widest where the excitement is loudest.
Why Japan is the sharp case. In Japan, 91% of travelers say they are excited about AI, but usage falls away as the journey moves toward commitment — high at the dreaming and discovery end, where a wrong suggestion costs nothing, low at the booking end, where it costs the trip. Guerreiro tied it to a market with "low tolerance for hallucinations," where privacy was the concern raised most, then job displacement. The appetite is real. The willingness to hand over the decision is not.
What Booking is doing about it. Rather than push through the gap, Guerreiro described pacing to it: a trip planner built on the premise that accuracy is non-negotiable, trust earned one use case at a time, a chatbot becoming an assistant only as fast as it stops being wrong. Read with the speaker in mind — a Booking executive narrating Booking's position — the framing has an incentive baked in: the company reads the gap as a matter of time, something that closes as the models improve. Its own data reads more like a matter of trust, which does not move on the same schedule.
What it means for hotels. The AI-booking future that everyone is pricing into acquisition strategy is gated by something the leading platform cannot manufacture on its timeline. For hotels and the vendors building AI into the booking path, the live question is no longer whether the tools work. It is whether travelers will trust the machine when it counts — at the point of commitment. On Booking.com's own evidence, that trust is arriving slowly, and unevenly, and last where the money is made.
Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →