Innovation Summit 2025: AI in the ongoing quest for travel personalisation

Three main hurdles remain

The future of travel is being built less on dramatic disruptions than on accelerated continuity: digitalization, aggregation, and personalization. Participants at the Travolution Innovation Summit, gathered in London, attempted to understand the dynamics accompanying the rise of AI and to imagine the transformations it will bring about.

To situate the resounding arrival of AI within a long-term perspective was the ambition of participants in one of the discussions held during the 2025 edition of the Travolution Innovation Summit, which recently took place in London. A roundtable discussion bringing together Filip Filipov (COO, OAG), Susie Stanford (partner, Growth Partner) and Min Liu (partner, Cambon Partners), and moderated by Kate Harden-England, editor of Travolution, provided an opportunity to examine how technological advancements are gradually being integrated to streamline the end-to-end travel experience.

In practice, AI is following an already established trajectory: that of more refined personalisation, fuelled by more natural interfaces and better-activated data. 

Its advent doesn't fundamentally change how we approach travel, but it allows the sector to take a few more steps towards a smoother, more contextualized, and potentially predictive experience.

“Ten or fifteen years ago, when we talked about personalization, everyone was enthusiastic. We had Facebook, mobile phones, and each time it was a promise of personalization,” recalls Filip Filipov, chief operating officer at OAG. 

“Today, we have AI, and it’s still about personalization. I bet that in five years, we’ll be sitting here talking about personalized travel, as if we had the right product at the right time, at the right price, for the right person, through the right channel.”

"This is not a zero-sum game."

Technological advancements promise to benefit consumers, but for professionals, AI also opens up new possibilities: operational efficiency, inter-party orchestration, anticipation of needs, and new revenue streams through enhanced customer journeys. 

For investors, the timing is favourable: the sector is enormous, undervalued, and has the potential to benefit all players if they reach an agreement.

There are three obstacles, however, according to the participants in this discussion, that prevent this adoption which is beneficial to all. They are: fragmented and insufficiently "clean" data to train reliable agents, legacy back-ends and booking systems that are costly to modernise, and economic agents who still profit from frictions, "a misalignment of incentives" according to Min Liu of Cambon Partners, who points out that some players exist precisely to resolve blockages that agentic AI could perhaps remove.

Travel, in fact, combines heterogeneous inventories (air, hotel, activities, local transportation), opaque pricing rules, and long value chains where each link holds a piece of the truth. 

The promise of AI is only sustainable if stakeholders share more data, with orchestration layers capable of streamlining, prioritizing, and securing it in real time.

“I think we need to find ways to work together better,” emphasises Filip Filipov. “It’s not a zero-sum game. 

The fact that you have information from a competitor or a partner doesn’t make that partner better or worse; I think it contributes to improving the entire industry. So we need to change our way of thinking a little.”

The continuation of this evolution and the integration of AI into the path that digitalisation has been forging for over a quarter of a century will inevitably transform the travel offering. Two poles could coexist. 

"We could find ourselves in a world where our travel portfolio is polarised between a frictionless experience, accessible with a single click, and a highly curated, but rare, experience ," predicts Susie Stanford of Growth Partner. 

Ultra-fluidity could meet the demands of business travel, with its one-click booking system, while the creation of rare experiences, intentionally filled with friction, will preserve perceived value, scarcity, and human interaction.