The AI Travel Planner Market Map

I posted this infographic on Linkedin, the comments are quite insightful, I thoroughly recommend them. Here’s a slightly broader take on that post.

I think AI travel assistants will change how we discover, plan, and book travel. Tell an AI what kind of holiday you want, your budget, preferences, and constraints, and it finds the right destination, hotel, flights, activities and books everything for you, plus gives you a complete itinerary.

There is an argument that people enjoy searching for travel, comparing prices, reading reviews, looking at photos, and building itineraries. And that they wont want AI to do it for them. That might be true (personally I’d rather have AI do most of the work).

But, historically, when technology makes something significantly easier, convenience tends to win. And travel search can get a lot better than it currently is. AI has an obvious opportunity here.

The infographic above lists some 40 AI Trip Planning products (not including the generic AI like GPT, Claude, Gemini which are probably the most used trip planners today). The categories are interesting, Inspiration only, Inspiration + Booking, AI research + Human closing and Human assistant with AI support. I wonder how many of these categories will survive (I have a penchant for the last category).

Other options could be that discovery simply moves to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other general AI platforms? Or OTAs manage to pivot (they’re already acquiring their way into the space) they already have the inventory, and infrastructure. They know how to deal with reservations and have a clue about itineraries. Many AI Planners are moving to the booking part which I think is the minimum. Pure inspiration will most likely sit in the general AI platforms.

But as several comments on my post point out, booking isn’t really the hardest part of travel. The difficult part is everything unpredictable. The flight gets cancelled, the replacement flight arrives two days later, hotel is over-booked, tired children, financial stress, etc. Who deals with all that? (Claude could even ban you if you insult it).

But then historically, OTAs became enormously successful without taking responsibility for the cancellations and problems. So maybe we’re overestimating how much people actually want someone to manage their travel. Maybe they just want an easier way to book, and AI delivers exactly that. Ryanair didn’t become the third largest airline in the world from it’s amazing service alone.

I’d love AI to bring back the personal travel agent, at scale and at an affordable price. But history suggests that making transactions easier and cheaper might be enough to win.

And perhaps that’s the difference between making travel easier to buy and making travel better. I suggest to read the original post, and specifically all the great insights in the comments. Some really great viewpoints in there.