The AI-driven travel industry of the future will see trusted intelligence become the driver of consumer behaviour rather than a price-led interface, according to OAG’s CEO Filip Filipov.
At this week’s Phocuswire Europe event in Barcelona, Filipov outlined how the online travel industry’s back-end has been architected to find the cheapest possible option, with the consumer-facing front-end designed to surface these options.
His trademark “sixty slides in 600 seconds” presentation illustrated his point that price has dominated the development of the industry. He noted that even when online travel shifted from desktop to mobile to smartphone, the search result pages were still designed to present the cheapest options.
This approach is on the industry. “We trained the world, all of us in this room, because we built the travel industry. We trained the world to buy travel like a commodity - cheapest first. Travel became just a list of prices.”
“But search is no longer the interface,” he continued. “Something changed.”
Artificial intelligence – agentic AI specifically - is obviously the change, and he insisted that a back-end built around surfacing the cheapest option needs to be abandoned in favour of one that can support the connected trip.
But that doesn't happen yet, he said. “But I think we can actually build that future together as an industry. The trip needs to be connected. We need a living itinerary, as opposed to a series of events where we try to plug in a little bit of advertising to capture somebody again by the cheapest price,” he said.
However, in the Q&A following his presentation, Mitra Sorrels, senior VP of content for Phocuswire, pointed out that “so many smart people have been trying to do this for some time, so what changes?”
“We need to get rid of the problems we have in the industry,” he replied. “We need real-time data, trusted identity. There has to be shared context between providers and partners, and we need operational truth. It's critical for us to be working on the back end to enable those incredible experiences in the future”
The ultimate aim of these changes is for travelers to trust the intelligence of their agentic AI because it understands context and intent, personalized, learning from previous interactions.
“The winners of the next operating system will not be the ones that own the interface as it was in the past, “he concluded. “They will own the trusted context and the trusted intelligence of bringing everything together.”
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