by Bert Archer
Last updated: 7:35 AM ET, Wed October 1, 2025
Julie Shainock, the global managing director of the travel, transport, and hospitality industries at Microsoft, pretty much summed up the thinking about AI among the corporate interests so invested in having us all as frantic about it as they are.
“You have to get started now or you'll be left behind.”
She said this on a panel, alongside Andrea Alori, a partner at consulting giant Bain & Co., and Gaurav Bhatnagar, ex of Microsoft and now co-founder of tbo.com, a B2B marketplace (also known as Travel Boutique Online) that connects travel suppliers with buyers.
Everyone was very excited, and in agreement that AI will change pretty much everything about the travel industry, from how trips are planned to how planes are built.
No one, however, seemed to know exactly—or even approximately—how.
“People are not looking for travel with Google, they're going to ChatGPT, and that's fundamental,” Bhatnagar said.
Is it?
Alori added that old models of searchability and SEO will soon no longer apply, though brand awareness will remain important, because if the initial AI prompt from travellers includes the brand—Air Canada, Ponant, Sunwing, etc.—then that is what will be returned.
So how is that different, exactly? That sounds perilously close to what used to be called GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you feed Sunwing into an AI prompt, AI will set out a travel plan for you that includes Sunwing.
Got it.
Shainock envisioned a near future in which a traveller’s AI agent will communicate with the AI agents of an airport, for example, or a hotel, and will then be able to direct the traveller to the best line in an airport, or to their room at the hotel. “I won’t be digitally ignored anymore,” she says, will be the result.
The new generative AI environment will also mean, it was agreed, that the current business model, especially for the OTAs, is likely going to get replaced by something else, though we don't know what that something else is. It will create new opportunities for startups as the starting line shifts. The idea being that Expedia and Booking.com may be replaced by more AI-friendly models.
There seems to be no sign of that yet, but perhaps it’s on the horizon—something to look out for.
Alori said that AI will be able to return travel plans and related data with greater accuracy than a human can, and Bhatnagar added that, in the course of travel planning, after an AI agent has returned a response, it will usually ask a follow-up question related to next steps, “and it's usually very accurate and you just say yes.”
Both comments make me wonder whether these people have ever actually used AI which is, as of this writing, dumb as a post.
Great excitement, very few details. The future, it seems, belongs to AI. “You have to get started now or you'll be left behind.”
As the sessions closed, and the day’s host, Rafat Ali, CEO of Skift and one of the sager voices on the travel scene, summed it all up rather well:
“Well, the good news is that either they'll all be right, or they'll all be wrong.”
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