Who’s Winning Airline Distribution in Travel and how OTAs build relationships

I guess the chat now is about agentic commerce and how ultimately you'll feed into your LMM that you want to take this trip at this price on these dates, and it'll automatically book everything based on the payment details it's got stored.

My personal view is travel is so personal.

Actually, people love being part of that journey.

They want to press the button.

From a payments perspective, that is much better.

But how are you guys kind of seeing the agentic side of things and how far do you think the machine will ultimately go? Do you think for you it'll go further than the assistance you're talking about in terms of the booking flow? Or do you still see very much you need that human just to...

That's part of the joy of booking travel, isn't it?

Exactly, exactly.

That discussion phase and kind of like, do you know what you want? I mean, a business traveler will have a different requirement as a business traveler.

You might be able to plug in your calendar to your AI agent and it will do the rest.

And you can just assume that it's got what you want.

But I'm very much with you on this, that travel is very emotional for travelers.

And there's a lot of kind of nuances that can kind of play into that as well.

So I think that AI will 100% change and will continue to change the way that we're interacting with travel.

There was a Focusrite report recently which said that in the US, 56% of travelers in the last 12 months used AI to book travel in part of that kind of booking journey.

And I think that's an important step to bear in mind.

Some of the areas that we're focusing on AI at that front end, we have Trip Genie, If you're on the app, you can find that little icon and have a conversation with it in natural language.

And then that will drop you into a search result.

So rather than you having to fill out two passengers from this place to that place.

So these are some of the ways that we're working with it at the moment.

It will also help with discovery and some of the other areas as well.

Like I say, the agentic side of it will be a challenge and it's something that we're very much kind of looking at and focused on.

How it will change the experience for the traveler will continue to evolve over the kind of Everyone says it here now, so over the months, if not years, of what's been ahead of us.

And ultimately, we're a technology company, so we want to be part of that journey.

We want to build solutions, not just for the traveler, but also for the suppliers, because managing this from a supplier perspective is going to be part of the challenge.