Agentic AI – The Single Biggest Impact Of AI On Hospitality

Transitioning hospitality from Mobile-first to AI-first will be the greatest transformation of our industry since the advent of the Internet. For all the doubters, look at the data: in April of 2025, ChatGPT reached 5.14 billion visits, up 182% from a year ago, while visits to Google declined by 3.2% (Similarweb).

Within this AI transformation, I believe Agentic AI will have the single biggest impact on our industry.

Agentic AI in travel and hospitality is a type of AI that makes autonomous travel decisions and takes actions to achieve specific tasks and goals, from travel planning, research of locations, amenities and rates, to booking hotels, flights and all of the necessary travel auxiliaries to make their master’s trip a success. This isn’t about your “old fashioned” AI assistant – it’s about fully autonomous AI agents that perform complex tasks in real time, interface with other AI Agents, while taking into consideration their “master’s’” personal preferences, likes and dislikes, travel history and past experiences, etc.

We have already witnessed the emergence of the Personal AI Agents. ChatGPT Operator, Google Gemini AI Agent, Microsoft Copilot AI Agent, Claude AI Agent, etc. are already a fact and their travel research, planning and booking capabilities are growing by the minute.

The booking path via the Personal AI Agent will be very simple: the traveler tasks via voice or typed prompts their AI Agent to find a hotel within certain parameters (location, dates, price range) and, based on all of their “master’s” preferences, the AI Agent finds and books the hotel and all necessary auxiliary services.

In the near future, Personal AI Agents will have the option to research, plan and book travel by making a “handshake” with the hotel and other travel suppliers’ own AI Agents, or with the OTA’s own AI Agents. The question is, with which one?

1. Hotel AI Agents

Since Personal AI agents can research, plan and book travelers’ trips and vacations autonomously, some experts predict that AI agents will dramatically change the current travel distribution status quo and even make the OTAs obsolete thus establishing the golden age of direct consumer-supplier relationships.

The question is, will hoteliers invest adequately in AI technology and talent to prepare for the rise of Personal AI Agents and become the ultimate beneficiaries of this exciting AI era?

In hospitality, the future Hotel AI Agent is expected to know everything about the property's product, services and amenities, about the destination, local area attractions and activities, festivals, performances and sports events.

It must also know everything that is to know about the property's past guests and be able to provide personalized one-to-one recommendations, pricing and services to "known guests," and close the deal with "new unknown guests."

Naturally, the Hotel AI Agent will be fully interfaced with a) Agentic AI platforms like ChatGPT Operator as well as b) the property's cloud PMS or CRS and CRM.

How are travelers going to use their Personal AI Agents?

A road warrior business traveler may ask his personal AI Agent: Book a flight to New York, June 20-23rd, Uber, the Hilton Midtown plus dinner at 6pm for four on June 21st at the Gallaghers Steakhouse. Over time, the prompt will become as simple as Book New York – the usual – here are the dates.

A leisure traveler may instruct their AI Agent: Find me a hotel in Manhattan June 20-25th, max $300 per night, close to Central Park for my morning run plus book Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway.

Naturally, the AI Agent will keep the traveler informed of important travel-related alerts and developments, such adverse weather, traffic, road construction, airport and flight delays, etc.

Where will the future Agentic AI platforms get information about the hotels, locations, amenities, ARI (Availability, Rates and Inventory)?

Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT are scraping content like crazy. They are like huge vacuum machines inhaling content from proprietary databases and the Internet.

As we know, hotel ARI is a dynamic content that you cannot just scrape from the Internet, content that requires a) real-time API to a cloud PMS, CRS or Channel Manager or b) handshake with the Hotel AI Agent, which already is API-ed with the above.

How dynamic is hotel ARI? A full-service hotel has to make, on average, over 5 million pricing decisions and rate changes a year (per IDeaS).

In my view, in the long run, Agentic AI and AI Agent platforms will make hotel websites and mobile apps obsolete. As mentioned above, to access hotel ARI, AI Agent platforms will need only a) APIs with the hotel cloud PMS, CRS or channel manager, or a handshake with the hotel's own AI Agent, or b) APIs with the OTAs or handshake with their AI Agents.

All of the generic hotel descriptions AI Agent platforms can easily scrape from publicly available information about the hotel on the Internet or from proprietary databases.

2. OTA AI Agents

The OTAs will have their own OTA AI Agents that will do their best to outshine and outwit Travel Suppliers’ AI Agents in their quest to dominate this new Agentic AI world. As past and current experiences show, the OTAs are much more willing to invest in new technologies and, once again, are much faster than travel suppliers, including hotels, in the adoption of Agentic AI.

Why do some industry experts think that Agentic AI platforms will prefer partnering with the OTAs?

With one API, AI Agent platforms can get access to real-time availability, pricing and booking capabilities with 750,000 hotels, 5 million STRs, 500 airlines and 200 car rental companies. In other words, with one API they can achieve what it took the OTAs 30 years and many billions of dollars to build.

In addition, the AI Agent platforms will get affiliate commissions from every booking they refer to the OTAs, enabling them to monetize their traffic. Let’s not forget that generative AI comes at a very steep price: an AI search query is 10 times more expensive than a regular Google search query.

Ex. Expedia has been actively using ChatGPT in their customer-facing app and their customer service operations for several years now. ChatGPT Operator pulls real-time travel inventory availability and pricing from and refers bookings to… Expedia. In return, it gets affiliate commissions from Expedia.

What should hoteliers do to take full advantage of this new Agentic AI era?

I hope smart hoteliers will see the potential of Agentic AI and invest in this new technology. I have no doubt, global hotel chains and avant-garde hotel brands are already investing in Agentic AI and AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization).

What about the independents? I am skeptical about the ability and willingness of independent hotels to invest in Agentic AI.

A good place for any independent to start is your AIO, the AI version of SEO. The era of stuffing your website content with SEO keyword terms is gone. General descriptions of your hotel product like We offer world-class spa treatments are meaningless for AIO. Instead use product-oriented content like We offer professional facial massage from $150.

Invest in content marketing with the goal to be cited everywhere. SEO company VertoDigital’s audits show that only 25% of AI answers are pulled from website content, in this case hotel website content. The rest comes from citations about the hotel in social media, YouTube, travel-related sites and blogs, customer reviews, etc.

Independents should be working with their cloud PMS, CRS or Channel Manager tech vendors to make sure they are plugged into the AI Agent platforms, similar to how the OTA CRSs have been API-ed with these same platforms. Also, I believe in the emergence of new AI Agent enablement tech vendors, specializing in hospitality, similar to today’s vendors that enable independent hotels for metasearch, B2B distribution, etc.