Will your travel platform be invisible in the age of AI Agents?

Planning a holiday starts with excitement… and then you have to juggle between five websites, multiple logins, and put the entire itinerary together by yourself.

Even the most “integrated” travel platforms leave you doing the work.

You need to compare prices, check loyalty benefits, decide which card will give you the best rewards, and then manually fill in booking details.

But with AI in the picture, that sequence disappears.

You’ll have a reliable travel agent in your pocket, one that remembers your preferences, reads your constraints, and acts on them without you lifting a finger.

You simply say:

“I need to be in New York next Thursday, back Sunday, stay near the conference venue, and find a good rooftop dinner spot for the first night.”

And you have your itinerary ready with:

• Flights selected to match timing, comfort preferences, and loyalty tier benefits.
• Hotels booked within walking distance of the venue, with your points balance applied.
• Dinner reservations made at a rooftop restaurant with high reviews and availability.
• Payments made using the card that maximises rewards for each booking.

The entire itinerary will be confirmed, synced to your calendar, and shared with fellow travellers based on your preference.

What does it mean for the travel industry?

Whether it is a travel aggregator, an airline, a hotel chain, or a vacation rental platform, the shift to agent-native experiences has huge potential to enhance the customer experience and boost revenue.

Every booking on a travel site or an integrated app still depends on the traveller manually clicking through forms, comparing options, and completing payments.

And that’s where drop-offs happen.

With agent-native design, the entire journey becomes seamless:

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• An AI agent can start and finish the booking on behalf of the traveller without them navigating every step.
• Price comparisons, loyalty redemption, and payment optimisation happen in the background.
• Bookings across flights, accommodation, events, and transport are coordinated in one flow.

For travel companies, this means:

• Higher conversion rates and fewer drop-offs because the agent completes the transaction end-to-end.
• Better loyalty programme engagement because the points and perks are automatically factored into bookings.
• Increased upsell opportunities as agents can offer premium upgrades or add-ons at the perfect moment.
• Lower servicing costs because of fewer manual queries or corrections after booking.

But this shift raises a strategic question:

• Will travel companies own the AI relationship? → Building a branded assistant, trained on their inventory, loyalty rules, and operational data.
• Or will they become AI-ready for others? → Opening secure, real-time APIs so that third-party AI agents can plan, book, and modify bookings directly.

Google’s Gemini travel agent, OpenAI’s Operator, and Expedia’s Trip Matching are already testing versions of it.

Either path changes the stakes, and for this, travel companies need to ensure that their data is accurate, accessible, and action-ready because in this new game, speed and context will win bookings.

How should travel companies approach it?

An AI agent is only as good as the APIs it can call. Without structured, secure, real-time APIs, your data is invisible to these new digital “power travellers.”

If these APIs are incomplete, outdated, or hard to access, your business becomes invisible to AI agents, and those bookings go elsewhere.

At DigitalAPI.ai, we help travel companies prepare for this AI-first future by fixing this foundation.

Here are the steps we follow:

1. Unify your APIs: Bring all your APIs into a single visibility layer so nothing is hidden in silos.
2. Catalogue and classify: Document what’s available, how to use it, and which actions it supports, making it easy for AI agents (and your own teams) to navigate.
3. Make APIs MCP-ready: Ensure they follow the Model Context Protocol so AI agents can understand and use them in context without manual intervention.
4. Standardise formats and authentication: Consistent structures and secure access make integration faster and safer for any AI agent or partner system.
5. Enable AI-to-AI interoperability: Allow your systems to communicate directly with other providers’ systems, so full trips can be assembled in real time.
6. Govern and secure: Apply policies to control sensitive actions like cancellations, upgrades, or refunds, ensuring only authorised changes happen.
7. Measure adoption: Track how often AI agents call your APIs, where drop-offs occur, and which integrations drive the most conversions.

I’ll be happy to get on a call to walk you through our solution. Book a demo now!