Travel agencies have helped travelers around the world plan and book their dream trips and vacations for decades. But with the popularity of artificial intelligence in public life over the last year, travel agencies are now figuring out how to incorporate AI into their business models.
According to a recent report from Phocuswright, over half of the U.S.’s active travelers are now using AI in their travel planning. The report found that 56% of travelers used AI over the past 12 months to plan, book, or assist with travel plans in real-time.
Just last year Google launched an AI tool attached to Google Flights called Flight Deals. This tool is intended to help travelers find flights that better meet their needs. The application allows travelers to ask AI questions and make requests like: “two week trip to a European country for a foodie road trip?” Or “find me a roundtrip flight to Rio de Janeiro for under $400 in the next six months.”
Travelers are now incorporating AI into their travel behavior regularly. Travel agency experts have reported consumer behavior has shifted rapidly in just 2026 alone. “I can safely say this is the fastest consumer behavior shift that we’ve tracked in a very long time of tracking consumer travel behavior,” said Mike Coletta, Phocuswright’s senior manager of research and innovation.
In March Phocuswright hosted its inaugural Travel Marketing AI Summit, a conference which confronted industry vets with the question: how do we incorporate AI into our marketing strategies in response to the recent surge in traveler AI behavior?
Travel Weekly reports travel agencies and companies must now shift from search engine optimization (SEO) to generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO). Some agencies have begun to see the positive effects of incorporating genAI into marketing strategies.
Understanding how AI surfaces information is the next challenge for travel agencies, as AI-owning companies will not often share how their AI collects and decides which data to put forward to users.
Travel agency Fora, says “there are many agents and agencies which have built SEO-driven businesses and for those agencies, thinking about how they appear in AI results will be important to continued growth. For agents and agencies who drive new business from existing client referrals, this probably matters less.”
For those agencies who are looking to optimize their platforms for AI crawlers and scrapers, Peters says having a clear structure, well-defined internal layout with headers, body text, and templates can attract more scrapers, and as a result, more eyes on a given site.
