OTAs pushed into back-end fulfillment roles

Booking.com and Expedia risk becoming invisible fulfillment layers as ChatGPT and Gemini take over planning and booking

AI assistants are increasingly planning and booking trips on behalf of travelers, bypassing traditional OTA interfaces. As a result, Expedia, Booking.com, and Trip.com risk losing visibility, engagement, and loyalty as the “control point” in travel shifts to AI intermediaries.

Key takeaways

• AI intermediates the booking journey: Users interact with ChatGPT or Gemini to plan and book, while OTAs may only appear as back-end fulfillment layers.
• Loss of engagement weakens search performance: Reduced browsing, fewer clicks, and shorter dwell times can signal lower relevance to search algorithms, threatening OTA rankings and traffic.
• Loyalty shifts from brand to assistant: Travelers may form loyalty to the AI that “knows them” rather than to OTA reward programs, unless those programs are integrated directly into AI ecosystems.
• Visibility moves from search rankings to recommendation sets: Instead of competing for page-one placement, OTAs must compete to be included in the AI’s selected options during conversational planning.
• Data quality and interoperability become strategic advantages: OTAs with clean inventory data, accessible APIs, and loyalty integration are more likely to be surfaced by AI agents.
• OTAs must adapt their marketing analytics: Traditional tracking won’t capture agentic booking flows, requiring new attribution models for AI-driven transactions.
• Future positioning depends on data leverage: OTAs can maintain relevance by using their large behavioral datasets to power AI partnerships or their own recommendation engines.

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