The hotel booking journey hasn’t kept up with the guest.
While the hospitality industry has made significant strides in technology – automating operations, enhancing distribution, streamlining guest messaging – the core mechanics of booking remain surprisingly rigid. In most cases, it’s still treated as a static funnel: a sequence of steps designed to move the guest from search to conversion with minimal friction. Optimization efforts have centered on UX tweaks and algorithmic personalization. But none of this addresses the deeper issue at hand.
Booking a hotel today has become cognitively exhausting. Guests are expected to sift through a crowded marketplace of options – balancing price, location, flexibility, amenities, and loyalty perks – while navigating conflicting information across channels. Decision-making under these conditions isn’t just difficult; it’s overwhelming. And yet, the industry continues to double down on personalization, hoping that more tailored content will help guests narrow their options and move more confidently toward a booking.
But most current personalization efforts are purely cosmetic. They adapt what you see, but they don’t help you understand why you should choose one option over another. And they assume you already know exactly what you want, when in reality, many guests are still unsure. On top of that, navigating through a large number of options can be overwhelming. Even if those options are technically available, they’re not always presented clearly or meaningfully. Often, the customer fails to discover all the alternatives, gets lost in ineffective filters, and ends up making decisions with incomplete information, or simply abandons the process altogether.
This is where the current model reaches its limit, and where the need for a new approach becomes evident. Agentic AI represents that paradigm shift. Unlike traditional systems that passively wait for user input, this new generation of artificial intelligence is designed to actively support decision-making in real time.
Instead of merely displaying options, it behaves more like a digital concierge than a chatbot: it engages in natural conversation, interprets the guest’s needs as they emerge, and takes initiative to simplify the process and deliver personalized recommendations. These systems are capable of reasoning, adapting, and acting autonomously – completely redefining the booking experience and finally coming closer to what a truly good salesperson would offer.
Traditional hotel systems wait for clicks. Agentic AI is built for a two-way, fluid, intuitive conversation. Guests don’t need to click through menus or guess which options to select; they can simply ask. Ask about availability, loyalty rewards, room layouts, pet policies, nearby restaurants, or check-in times. And unlike chatbots that serve up scripted replies, Agentic AI gets things done. It interprets the request, retrieves the right data, applies the appropriate business logic, and takes actions – powering bookings, upsells, changes, and follow-ups in one seamless flow.
Rather than treating the guest journey like a linear path optimized solely for transactional conversion, it recognizes human decision-making exactly for what it is: iterative, exploratory, and often hesitant. It doesn’t require the guest to navigate the process alone; it meets them in the process and walks with them through it.
But for agentic AI to deliver on that promise, it requires native integration with the hotel’s Central Reservation System (CRS), booking engine, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – giving it access to real-time availability, guest history, preferences, entitlements, and pricing logic, along with relevant hotel and area information drawn from the website or other content sources. Without this foundation, the AI is limited to surface-level suggestions. With it, it can adapt the journey dynamically, personalize offers in context, and take action on the guest’s behalf. The intelligence must be able to act, not just inform, and that’s only possible when it’s deeply connected to the systems that drive the guest experience from search to stay.
Once this connectivity is in place, Agentic AI can begin to address the deeper pain points that traditional personalization can’t. Guests aren’t abandoning because they can’t find hotels; they’re abandoning because they’re uncertain. Because the experience doesn’t give them the confidence that they’re making the right choice. Because the system still expects them to make sense of it all on their own.
This is the real opportunity: to design booking journeys around how people think, not just how they search. Agentic AI makes that possible. By guiding the guest through the process, adapting to their inputs in real time, and reducing the burden of choice, it restores clarity to a moment that’s become cluttered. The result isn’t just a smoother interface; it’s a more confident decision. And that confidence is what ultimately drives conversion, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.
For hoteliers, this shift demands more than adopting new technology. It requires a new mindset – one that prioritizes guest understanding over funnel efficiency. One that sees booking not as a series of tasks to be completed, but as a journey to be supported. The tools we’ve relied on until now have reached their limits. If we want to build systems that truly serve the guest, we need to start by serving the way they think.
About the Author
Andrew McGregor leads The Access Group’s Hotel software division globally, a division serving over 20,000 hotels across 35 countries, that helps accommodation providers drive revenues and efficient operations encompassing bookings, distribution, revenue management, digital guest experience, property and F&B management.
