Beyond the Buzzword - What ITB Berlin 2026 Really Said About AI in Travel

If the word “AI” could be counted, it would have broken every record at ITB Berlin 2026. From keynote stages to booth demos to corridor conversations, artificial intelligence was inescapable. But beneath the familiar chorus of promises and polished demos, something more interesting was happening: the industry was beginning to grow up about AI — asking harder questions, sharing real deployments, and confronting the uncomfortable gap between aspiration and execution.

We asked a cross-section of leaders who attended ITB Berlin to share the single AI takeaway that still resonated with them days later. What emerged is a portrait of an industry in genuine transition — one where early euphoria is giving way to a more mature, and in some ways more demanding, conversation about what comes next. 

I. The Shift Has Happened. Now What? 

The most consistent signal from our contributors is that AI has crossed a threshold. The question is no longer whether it matters.

What was still driven by curiosity and hype last year has now turned into a much more strategic discussion. The industry is no longer asking whether AI matters, but what it can actually deliver in practice.

Michael Toedt, CEO & Founder, dailypoint™

Sophie Pommois, writing as an independent hospitality consultant for Hospitality Net, saw this concretely on the show floor: native booking apps inside ChatGPT — demonstrated by both Apaleo and Lighthouse — signalled that agentic AI has moved from theory to early reality. She learned that 15 to 20 hotel groups are already deploying agents in live environments, with adoption moving faster than anything previously seen in hotel technology. Smaller, more innovative operators are leading; larger chains remain more cautious.

Mark Fancourt, Co-Founder of TRAVHOTECH, noticed the shift from a different angle. Rather than talking about AI, he found himself experiencing it — genuine tools embedded in vendor technology that could successfully automate tasks and surface information through real AI reasoning, not first-generation chatbots. “That’s a great transgression from probably a couple of years of discussion,” he observed. 

II. Agentic AI: From Information to Action 

If there is one theme that dominates the responses, it is agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions but take actions on behalf of users. The demonstrations at ITB made this tangible in a way that previous years’ discussions did not.

The audience went quiet for a moment. Not because it was magic but because it felt normal.

Sergio Golia, VP Strategy, Amadeus IT Group

Sergio Golia delivered one such moment live on stage at ITB, demonstrating a rebooking of his own flight home — not by calling a helpdesk or navigating an app, but through a natural conversation with an AI agent that handled rebooking, seat selection, baggage, and transfer all in a single phone call. For Golia, this moment illustrated something more nuanced than efficiency: “After years of AI being framed as a replacement for human roles in travel, I demonstrated something more interesting: AI that makes the traveller feel more looked after, not less.”

Matthijs Welle, CEO of Mews, pushes the opportunity further into the specific context of hotels. His argument is that hotels already possess the raw material AI needs — years of proprietary guest data — and that agentic AI is finally what converts that latent asset into operational action. A lactose intolerance note in a reservation becomes a housekeeping task before arrival. A return visitor’s dining history becomes a conversation at check-in. “The data was always there,” Welle notes. “AI removes the manual effort and does it every time.”

His call to action is equally direct. At an ITB panel he asked a room of 400 hospitality professionals how many had personally built an AI agent. Just a few hands went up. His prescription: spend a Sunday building something small, expect frustration, push through it. “The best time to get your hands dirty was six months ago. The second best time is now.” 

III. The Plumbing Problem: Data First, AI Second

For all the talk of agents and automation, several contributors identified what may be the most important and least glamorous challenge: the quality of the underlying data and infrastructure. Agentic AI can only be as intelligent as the systems it operates on.

Before we orchestrate agents, we need to orchestrate our data and our systems. And, of course, our people.

Simone Puorto, Head of Emerging Trends, Hospitality Net

Simone Puorto argues that many organisations are approaching AI adoption the wrong way around. Before deploying models, agents, or copilots, they need to understand their own data, their tech stack, and the operational processes underneath them. If CRM, PMS, CDP, and booking systems contain fragmented or poorly structured data, no AI layered on top will fix that. He extends the point beyond technical silos to what he calls “people silos” — teams operating with inconsistent processes that no algorithm can easily resolve.

Mark Hollyhead, Chief Transformation Officer at Aven, frames the same issue from a distribution perspective. While much of the industry remains focused on AI at the presentation layer — chat interfaces, trip planners, concierge bots — he argues the real shift is happening deeper in the stack: “the ability for machines to access clean, real-time, permissioned commerce data, rates, availability, policies, and ancillaries.” His conclusion is deliberately unglamorous: “The industry spent a week talking about AI, but the real conversation should have been about plumbing.”

Last time hospitality outsourced distribution. This time it might outsource its brain. And once that happens, good luck buying it back.

David Poprawka, Principal Solution Consultant, Infor

David Poprawka of Infor offers the starkest version of this argument. He watched ITB attendees identify the data problem out loud — and then stop. “Anyone can build a bot,” he writes. “The real work is organizing, governing, and evolving the data foundation behind it.” His historical parallel is pointed: in an earlier era, hospitality outsourced its distribution layer. In this one, it risks outsourcing its intelligence.

Uli Pillau, Founder and CEO of Apaleo, adds a structural prescription: the businesses best positioned will be those with open, flexible infrastructure as their foundation. It is this openness that makes it possible to put AI tools to work in practical ways, “turning new ideas into actionable solutions that can improve the guest journey, simplify operations and create value much faster.” He acknowledges the gap candidly: “very few tech companies are able to prove that they can make AI work within their customer base.”

IV. The Economics of AI-Mediated Distribution 

Beneath the operational conversation lies a strategic one that many at ITB appeared reluctant to address directly: who captures the value when AI mediates the traveller’s decision?

If AI connects travellers to OTA checkout, the OTA captures the booking. If it connects to the hotel’s website and booking engine, the hotel captures the value.

Pedro Colaco, CEO, GuestCentric Systems

Pedro Colaco identifies what he sees as a blind spot in the industry’s AI conversation: most discussions focused on tools while paying little attention to how AI will change the economics of hotel distribution, or who will ultimately pay for the tokens these systems consume. As AI agents increasingly sit between the traveller, OTAs, and hotels, they will shape decisions — and eventually expect to capture value from the transaction. The final step, Colaco argues, remains unchanged: “AI may guide the traveller, but the reservation must still be completed somewhere trusted.” Where that somewhere is will determine the industry’s economic structure for years to come.

Hollyhead reaches a similar conclusion: “Whoever controls the structured supply that AI agents can reliably transact against will increasingly shape demand.” The competitive moat of tomorrow is not the AI model itself. It is the clean, connected, accessible data that AI can act on reliably.

Brian Dass, Founder and CEO of OneJourney, adds a perspective heard directly from the stage: AI will not replace SaaS platforms in hospitality but will increasingly be embedded within them. Hotels rely on dozens of interconnected tools that only function because people continuously feed them context, judgment, and real-world experience. “The real opportunity lies in combining AI, SaaS platforms, and human expertise to improve operations and deliver better guest experiences,” he argues. 

V. The Human Dimension 

Running through many of the responses is a careful recalibration of what AI means for people — both guests and the staff who serve them.

Klaas Koerten, Researcher in Robotics at Hotelschool The Hague, offers a grounding perspective: AI primarily shines in the digital realm — pre-stay marketing, post-stay feedback processing, loyalty analytics. In the most physical lines of work — cleaning rooms, preparing food — AI applications remain focused on managerial oversight rather than direct task assistance. He continues to watch closely for innovations that relieve the heaviest manual labor in the sector, and has not yet seen them at scale.

The shift from reactive tools to proactive decision support has the potential to truly improve productivity and operational efficiency in hotel organisations.

Wouter Geerts, Director of Market Research, Mews

Wouter Geerts, also from Mews, points to the next frontier: the evolution from reactive AI tools to proactive ones. Rather than waiting for a user query, the hotel systems of tomorrow should actively surface relevant insights, highlight areas requiring attention, and recommend decisions before staff even think to ask. That shift — from answering questions to anticipating needs — is where he believes AI will have its deepest operational impact.

Mark Antipof, Chief Growth Officer at HBX Group, frames this as the real differentiator of the coming period: not simply adopting AI tools, but combining them with strong data and a deep understanding of the travel ecosystem “whilst maintaining the uniqueness that their brand represents in the eyes of their consumers.” Technology without brand identity, he implies, produces a race to the bottom. 

VI. A Note of Healthy Scepticism

 Not every contributor left Berlin inspired. Several offered a sharply critical view of what they saw on the show floor — and the criticism is worth taking seriously.

We’re NOT solving new problems. We’re repackaging the same challenges in pricing, upselling, and forecasting with an AI sticker.

Fabian Bartnick, Founder, Infinito

Fabian Bartnick was blunt: AI was everywhere, mostly as a label rather than a real capability. After a few probing questions, he found, many vendor claims dissolved — systems that were simply layering interfaces on top of third-party models rather than building anything that genuinely learns, adapts, or changes decisions. He identifies a deeper problem: the tech sector is trying to squeeze AI into outdated SaaS pricing models that ignore the reality of usage-based costs, and the industry at large is asking the wrong questions. “Hotels were asking, ‘Do you use AI in your system?’ — and when I said, ‘For what exactly?’ the conversation stopped.”

Florian Montag, SVP Revenue at Apaleo, is more measured but reaches a similar observation: while everyone was talking about AI, genuinely working examples that create real value remained rare. What gave him optimism were operator-driven use cases — hotels like McDreams and THE FLAG — where AI has moved beyond assistance into autonomous action. “That is the point where AI starts to have real meaning for hospitality,” he notes: faster execution, less friction, more scalable operations. 

VII. The Call to Action

 The picture that emerges from ITB Berlin 2026 is one of an industry at a genuine inflection point — not the imagined inflection point of previous hype cycles, but a messier, more real one. The technology is maturing. Demos are becoming deployments. The questions are getting harder.

The future won’t belong to the companies that talk the most about AI. It’ll belong to those who turn complexity into decisive action. In this cycle, waiting isn’t ‘caution.’ Waiting is just drifting.

Ali Beklen, Founder & Managing Partner, HotelRunner

Ali Beklen, Founder and Managing Partner of HotelRunner, calls for what he describes as a triple reset: of mindset (AI is not a bolt-on feature but a structural transformation), of expectations (look past the interface and focus on the weight of better decisions), and of timelines (this shift is already outpacing traditional leadership cycles). His argument is that hospitality has never had an information problem — it has an execution bottleneck. “For decades, we forced humans to learn complex software. Now, AI is finally forcing the technology to understand humans.”

The data needs cleaning. The infrastructure needs building. The agents need testing. The economics need mapping. And someone — as Poprawka reminds us — actually has to build the intelligence layer that makes it all work.

The contributors gathered here disagree on the pace, the risks, and the immediate priorities. But on one point there is near-unanimity: the conversation at ITB 2026 was different from the one the year before — more grounded, more urgent, and more consequential. Whether the industry rises to meet it may depend on how many of its leaders choose to stop watching the demo and start building something of their own.

The best time to start was six months ago. The second best time, as Matthijs Welle put it, is now.

Check out the full World Panel Viewpoint "ITB Berlin AI Insights."

CONTRIBUTORS

• Matthijs Welle  •  CEO, Mews

• Sergio Golia  •  Vice President, Strategy, Amadeus IT Group

• Uli Pillau  •  Founder and CEO, Apaleo GmbH

• Mark Hollyhead  •  Chief Transformation Officer, Aven

• Simone Puorto  •  Head of Emerging Trends and Strategic Innovation, Hospitality Net

• Michael Toedt  •  CEO and Founder, dailypoint™

• David Poprawka  •  Principal Solution Consultant, Global Products, Infor

• Sophie Pommois  •  Independent, Hospitality Net

• Pedro Colaco  •  CEO, GuestCentric Systems

• Klaas Koerten  •  Researcher Robotics, Hotelschool The Hague

• Florian Montag  •  SVP Revenue, Apaleo GmbH

• Ali Beklen  •  Founder & Managing Partner, HotelRunner

• Brian Dass  •  Founder & CEO, OneJourney

• Wouter Geerts  •  Director of Market Research, Mews

• Mark Fancourt  •  Co-Founder & Principal Consultant, TRAVHOTECH

• Mark Antipof  •  Chief Growth Officer, HBX Group

• Fabian Bartnick  •  Founder, Infinito