It’s no secret that the AI revolution has arrived, and the online hotel distribution sector has already adapted to the first ripple effects.
NB: This is an article from SiteMinder, one of our Expert Partners
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
But OpenAI’s Operator, launched earlier this year, revived concerns about the lifespan of long-standing industry players in the wake of new technologies.
The AI agent not only reads data, but can also interact with a browser.
This means in addition to generating travel recommendations and plans, Operator can make bookings, only asking users to take over for tasks that require login and payment details, or to solve CAPTCHAs.
Adding to the momentum, Perplexity recently partnered with fintech platform Selfbook and Tripadvisor to bring hotel bookings directly into its AI-powered ‘answer engine’ – another clear sign that agentic AI is on the rise.
Currently, Online Travel Agents (OTA) are still the biggest drivers of hotel booking revenue, having withstood and adjusted to decades of technological advances – including mobile, a revolution that many thought would leave an OTA behind and instead has seen them use to further their competitive advantage.
Yet new tools like Operator and Perplexity raise questions.
Does the advent of AI agents signal the beginning of the end for third-party bookings, or are we simply entering a new phase in the evolution of online hotel distribution? And, how can other key industry players, particularly hotels, learn from the action OTAs have already taken?
Glimpse into the AI-led future
As with any industry where multi-layered intelligence is key to achieving the ultimate goal of personalisation, data is king in travel.
For this reason, revenue managers and OTAs analyse a range of past, present and future factors to sell the right rooms at the right times, at the right prices, to the right guests.
So when looking for their next stay, today’s guests are offered broadly personalised options largely based on the type of traveller profile they fall into, according to their demographic’s general preferences.
AI tools like Operator could take things a step further and tailor accommodation offers to suit each individual guest, thanks to the large pool of data at AI’s disposal and the technology’s ability to analyse and act on all of that information quickly.
