Travolution Connects 2026: AI in travel is not yet mature

Sector gets a B- grading for AI maturity

A B-. That was the grade a panel titled "let’s reassess where AI is” at the 2026 Travolution Connects event in London gave to the travel sector’s level of AI maturity. 

According to the panellists - Sarah Ditton, director of customer success at Alyza; Charline Bouthier, head of AI delivery at Club Med,; and Manuel Hilty, CEO and co‑founder of Nezasa - companies are experimenting, but still measure activity more than impact. 

Fragmented initiatives, they argued, prevent a rethink of the end‑to‑end customer journey. The leaders for now remain online travel agencies and airlines, which benefit from deep data and a firm grip on dynamic pricing, ranking and personalisation.

“Too often, we’re still measuring activity rather than impact,” Ditton said. 

“So we keep rolling out AI‑based projects, which is obviously a good start, but we don’t really measure whether they actually improve our company’s performance. As a result, we simply fail to hit the targets we’ve set ourselves, and that’s essentially why I give it a B-".

The organisations that manage to move beyond pilots, the panellists said, tend to share three ingredients: a clear vision, step‑by‑step execution to learn quickly and explicit success criteria. At Club Med, implementation is built on business–tech co‑design: start from existing processes and reinvent them with AI, rather than chasing novelty for its own sake. 

“Across our resorts we have what we call the ‘welcome and services’ team, who work front of house and have to handle many manual, largely administrative tasks, which leaves little time with guests,” Bouthier said. 

“We’re rethinking, in depth, how we could reorganise how this team operates so it can spend much more time with customers.” Pilots are launched only when backed by a solid business case and an architecture designed to scale.

Integrating AI across the entire journey - inspiration, conversation, booking, stay, operations and on‑site experience - was presented as the best way to capture value. 

While the most mature uses still sit at the start of the customer experience, in marketing and pricing, the panellists are now eyeing the next frontier: post‑booking. The sequence that follows purchase concentrates unresolved operational effort for both operators and travellers. 

The work that begins after the booking, from managing information and requests through to support and operational orchestration, is they argued, where AI can create the most value.

It's more than adoption, it's a transformation

Today’s leaders have years of behavioural and transactional data, revenue‑optimisation tools and a culture of experimentation. By contrast, many organisations struggle with uneven data quality, silos and a proliferation of non‑interoperable tools. 

The speakers also warned against aiming too narrowly by mapping AI onto existing ways of working. Change management becomes central: creating dedicated roles, rolling out training at scale and giving a top‑down mandate to harmonise approaches and avoid scattergun efforts.

“You have to change the way you do things entirely. If you don’t, both internally across every process and as a provider of products and technology, you’ll miss huge opportunities,” Hilty said. 

“One of the biggest mistakes an organisation makes when adopting AI is to see it purely as adoption and optimisation, and not as a true transformation  which is what it should be.”

The panellists said this vision is already taking shape. Club Med cites a WhatsApp deployment launched in Brazil and since extended to 23 markets: 47% of conversations are automated, according to Bouthier, with the option to hand over to a human agent. 

Alyza points to a river cruise operator that analysed millions of customer exchanges and lifted its conversion rate by 89% in six months by industrialising proven best practices. 

Method matters as much as technology: pilots tied to a validated use case, a scalable architecture from the outset and quantified objectives enable the shift from pilot to industrialisation.

The 2026 edition of Travolution Connects took place on 23 June in London.