How will AI affect the travel industry in 2025?

One thing you can count on when it comes to technology is that it never slows down. It makes “keeping up” both exciting and frustrating. This has been especially true with AI.?

To keep updated on what’s happening in AI – particularly related to travel – I follow a few people and organizations including Gilad Berenstein , Dr. Jill Schiefelbein , and The Rundown AI . Gilad, in particular, has his finger on the pulse of travel tech more than anyone else I know. He organizes Travel Tech Summit at Virtuoso Travel Week – which is a must-attend event for me each year. It gives me a chance to hear from tech startups and industry insiders who always have great wisdom to share.??

He recently wrote an article aimed at AI startups, but it had some insight that is relevant to all of us. Gilad shared this about AI:?

At this point, and if not now then soon, most businesses will have already played and tested, got the sugar high, saw little to no real ROI from their early AI efforts, and sobered up. Through this process, they built internal AI expertise and domain knowledge, identified high-value opportunities, and created success criteria. Thus, at this point most sophisticated businesses, and many less technically sophisticated ones as well, know what problems they want to be solved, have stacked ranked them, and have identified what success looks like. Thus, they are ready to go.?

I think “ready to go” is where many of us are with AI. We know it is amazing. We know it does lots of great things, but we just aren’t sure what or how. I would venture that most of us have dabbled with ChatGPT or similar platforms. We are confident that there is much more we can have it do, but what exactly is it??

As Matthew Upchurch is famous for saying, “Automate the predictable so you can humanize the exceptional.” It seems that automating the predictable is a sweet spot for AI.??

Whether you are a travel advisor, hotelier, DMC, or tech company, what is it that you do that is exceptional – and what could be handled by AI to give you space to be even more exceptional???

If you already have a tech guru on your team who is focused on AI and implementing it in your organization, congratulations! (And I’m jealous!) For most of us, it looks more like trial and error that produces mixed results.??

For many, leveraging what our existing tech partners are already doing is probably the best way forward. Some travel tech companies we work with - including Sion , Tern , and Travefy - have built AI into their products to handle tedious tasks. I love it when smart people come up with smart solutions to make our lives easier. Now, if someone would just figure out laundry...?

I am confident there are a lot more AI-powered solutions that will be coming our way in 2025. The key to knowing about them is to be in the right conversations and rooms so you know what’s out there, and to be open to change so you can implement new tools.??

Following smart people on LinkedIn like Gilad is a great start. I also encourage you to meet with your tech partners and ask, “What’s new? What are you doing with AI?” Some of these companies move so quickly that you don’t even realize how many new features you could already be leveraging in your existing tools.

Another way to learn and keep current is to form a “support group” of people in similar roles or companies. I have a group of super smart people in other agencies that I connect with periodically and I always learn so much from them. We are all better when we dig into these things together.??

No matter how you approach it, I think 2025 will be a pivotal year for all of us with AI where the focus will shift from just talking about possibilities to focusing on practical applications in our day-to-day work. I can’t wait to see what we discover!