Travel is full of outdated pain points. The never-ending queue to check in at the airport. The manual paperwork when you arrive at your hotel. The endless phone calls and emails to change your booking date if something goes wrong. Sometimes it can feel like the travel industry is still trapped in the early 2000s.
I’ve been in the travel industry for over a decade, and while we’re seeing rapid development in some sub-sectors, some things haven’t changed since my first day – and it’s because of a lack of connectivity. In an increasingly digitised world, the travel industry is still lagging behind.
Since I joined Emerging Travel Group, an online travel company that operates brands RateHawk, Roundtrip, and ZenHotels, in 2013, we’ve been focusing on enhancing global supply connectivity. Today, we source accommodation offers from over 330 suppliers and 220,000 directly contracted properties, to which we add over 450 airlines, 20+ transfer suppliers, car rentals, and rail tickets.
But integrating all of these supply sources is far from seamless. Industry-wide connectivity challenges continue to create friction, slowing down innovation and complicating even basic processes.
I’ll give you an example. Despite billions in investments in travel tech, one of the most persistent and frustrating issues for travel stakeholders remains amendability, or making changes to a booking. Plans change all the time, whether you’re booking a family vacation or managing travel for a 500-person company.
People need to shift dates, swap out names, or add someone to the reservation. Yet almost none of 330 suppliers connected to ETG have thought about amendability. In fact, only a handful of them support name and date amendments via an API. For most of the industry, the only way to make a change is by canceling and rebooking reservations.
It may sound easy until you actually try to do it. In reality, it is almost always a manual process requiring long phone calls to the hotel or a supplier and emails going back and forth.
If it is a non-refundable booking, it gets even worse. And it’s expensive: some travel management companies charge up to $30 just to make a change. Plus, there’s the risk that the hotel sells out in the meantime, and you lose the booking altogether.
It appears that we have built AI-powered planners, tools, and systems, but somehow, we haven’t solved the most human, most common problem in travel: the fact that plans change.
The root cause of the problem is simple: hotel inventory systems are ancient. The reason we can’t make simple changes to bookings is that the inventory systems running most hotel chains were never built to allow it. The software just doesn’t have the concept.
In a perfect world, hotel systems would provide clean APIs, and there would be a standard amendment function that everyone, including consolidators, channel managers, and OTAs could use. But that’s not the world we live in.
And here is the harder truth: the big players in the industry don’t intend to fix this. There is no clear commercial incentive to rebuild their systems from scratch and no pressure to do so. So maybe we have to admit this isn’t going to change – at least, not from the inside.
But that doesn’t mean we’re stuck. There’s a way forward, and it doesn’t require tearing down the old systems. I’m a tech optimist, and I really believe AI can change the game here.
AI agents can act as a kind of intelligent middleware: a smart glue that connects broken, fragmented systems and makes them usable, without needing deep changes underneath.
These AI agents can do what humans do now, but faster and at scale. They can creatively cancel and rebook. They can understand the intent: “change the dates, but keep the same room type.” They can navigate across fragmented systems, PMSs, consolidators, channel managers, and intelligently match parameters like room types, rates and amenities.
In short, they can actually resolve the case instead of just passing it along and creating more manual work for humans.
They won’t make legacy software good. But they might make it good enough to work with. The tools already exist. The only thing missing is the willingness to apply them.
And this is just one use case in a massive industry. But there are dozens or maybe hundreds of others. Every corner of the travel industry has these annoying inefficiencies that pile up into huge operational burdens. AI agents could quietly clean up all of them.
That’s why I think companies that have reached some scale should take responsibility. If you have the resources, you should be using them to make things better – not just for yourself, but for the ecosystem around you.
Start investing in AI agents now. This foundational shift can make everything else easier. The sooner you start, the sooner the whole industry gets better.
