Phocuswright’s Travel Innovation and Technology Trends 2025, published in February 2025, aimed to provide an in-depth overview of the real-time developments surrounding the travel industry throughout the year, including key focal points on the impact of AI on company operations, the in-destination experience, distribution dynamics, travel marketing and more. Watch the webinars and read the summaries linked from the report for important analysis of the issues that will define travel in the coming years.
Generative AI is streamlining everything from content creation and customer service to yield forecasting. In 2025, major tech firms turned AI into infrastructure: Google’s Agentspace, Salesforce’s AgentForce and OpenAI’s Operator all launched within months of each other. For travel suppliers, the near-term goal is augmentation, not replacement. Teams become faster and more creative, while competition keeps the human bar high. But the prerequisite is clear: clean data. Most travel companies still need to modernize systems and feeds so agents can reason effectively.
AI is becoming contextual and ambient. The latest ChatGPT and Gemini releases combine reasoning, speech and vision, making real-time travel companions practical across phones and emerging wearables. In demos such as Google’s Project Astra, travelers ask what they’re seeing through a phone or smart glasses and get instant, spoken context, translation and suggestions.
The most heated debate of 2025: Will autonomous agents favor OTAs or suppliers? On one side, OTAs have decades of distribution know-how and data pipelines that agents can easily tap. On the other, generic agents can crawl or call suppliers directly, bypassing intermediaries. For simple trips, agents may book direct; for complex itineraries, aggregators may be favored. Regardless, backend systems must be ready for the onslaught of agentic traffic. In his final report for Phocuswright before retirement, longtime analyst Norm Rose shared his vision of the future of distribution.
Marketers are already feeling the squeeze. One in 10 U.S. internet users now starts online discovery inside a generative AI tool (Semrush) and zero-click searches (where the user sees the answer on the results page and clicks nothing) rose from 22.8% in July 2024 to 26.7% in September 2025 (Datos/SparkToro). The new goal isn’t ranking higher; it’s being cited in answers. Travel brands must ensure their content is structured, verified and machine-readable so it can appear inside AI-assembled summaries.
AI alone can suggest. Paired with digital identity, it can transact. Digital identity wallets will soon hold verified credentials, payment details and travel preferences—enabling one-click, agent-driven booking across multiple suppliers. By 2026, half a billion smartphone users are projected to have a digital ID wallet (Gartner). For autonomous agents, identity is the trust key; it proves who they represent and what actions they’re authorized to take. Without it, the “agentic economy” cannot scale safely.
