Guest Post: The future of travel is hyper-personalised, but are we ready?

Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer of Agoda, walks us through a look beneath the surface

The expectations around travel personalisation have fundamentally shifted. A recent survey by GlobalData found that nearly a third of travellers now consider personalisation essential when making travel-related purchases. Customer expectations are rising, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are advancing to meet them. The question is whether the travel industry is ready to deliver at scale.

Across the industry, many travel companies are evolving from being service providers to becoming proactive travel assistants capable of anticipating traveller needs.

Today, that shows up in smart features like embedded eSIMs, airport transport integration, and more intelligent payment flows. Tomorrow, it could mean rescheduling your beach trip based on real-time weather bulletins, auto-alerting your hotel and taxi if your flight is delayed, or dynamically adjusting your itinerary to reflect local events. Hyper-personalisation is about reducing friction while increasing relevance – through a deep understanding of traveller intent, not just reacting to what they've searched for, but anticipating what they'll need next.

The tech beneath the surface

Delivering such a hyper-personalised experience requires the real-time orchestration of systems that have traditionally operated in silos: search algorithms, payments infrastructure, inventory systems, customer support, and in-destination engagement.

For years, machine learning has powered elements of the travel journey quietly: from ranking relevant accommodations to predicting price fluctuations and surfacing high-value options out of millions of listings. Today, deep learning models increasingly take into account historical behaviour, contextual cues, and inferred preferences to help travellers find the right stay or activity faster.

What’s changing now is that AI is stepping out from behind the curtain. Travel companies are beginning to deploy conversational tools, such as Agoda’s Property AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) Bot, that address complex traveller questions instantly, while automated image and content classification systems offer more accurate, engaging visuals at scale. These advancements not only improve the customer experience but accelerate product development, allowing teams to test, iterate, and ship improvements faster than before.

This efficiency gives the industry the velocity needed to anticipate what travellers will want next, and test and execute at pace.

The intelligence behind the booking

Hyper-personalisation requires an understanding of the cultural context and how travellers make decisions. While it’s easy to spark curiosity about a destination or an activity, converting that inspiration into a completed booking is an entirely different challenge that spans the entire booking journey. 

Consider payments… In Asia, each market has its own preferred payment methods, from instant transfers to digital wallets to local credit ecosystems. Ensuring that travellers can transact in the way they prefer, be it Alipay in China, GrabPay in Southeast Asia, or Paytm in India, is one of the most decisive steps in the booking journey. Without that final layer of localisation, earlier personalisation efforts lose their impact.

This intelligence isn’t valuable only to travellers. The billions of interactions recorded across the travel ecosystem every day offer powerful insights to hoteliers, tourism boards, and local businesses. They enable smarter demand forecasting, more relevant promotions, and deeper alignment between what travellers want and what providers offer. The result is an ecosystem increasingly driven by data and context rather than standardized assumptions about traveller behaviour.

The ‘perfect booking’ is not far away

We can describe the evolution of AI in three stages: personalisation, service expansion, and ultimately, proactive engagement. And data ties it all together, plus the ability to act on it, instantly. 

Here's what hyper-personalisation looks like in practice: imagine a traveller is looking for a restaurant that their kids will love. In just a few keystrokes, they get the top five options, all within walking distance of their hotel (that they booked last week), serving gluten-free options (from their search history for their last trip to Venice), with baby chairs available (they searched for attractions with nursery rooms in the vicinity last month). They also found bundle packages offered by these restaurants, with experiential offerings perfect for their family trip (based on reviews they have left for similar experiences).

This isn't just remembering past searches, it's synthesising signals across multiple touchpoints to predict what is needed before it is asked for.

The shift from reactive service to intelligent anticipation is already underway. The more trust travellers place in digital platforms, the more seamlessly this evolution will unfold.

A truly hyper-personalized experience requires collective effort across the industry: OTAs, hoteliers, tour operators, and activity providers. Many still face real barriers: fragmented data, legacy infrastructure, and lack of unified personalisation strategies. The value that can be delivered to travellers is limited by what the industry can collectively achieve.

Moving forward means acknowledging these challenges and working together to address them. 

That starts with concrete steps:

• Investing in AI capabilities not just for gimmicky stunts or verbose chatbots, but for practical product features that effectively enhance the customer experience.
• Staying agile to changes in local preferences and behaviors, whether it’s through enabling preferred payment methods, establishing regional partnerships or integrating hyper-local content creators into marketing strategies.
• Public-private partnerships, such as Singapore’s partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate local AI adoption and Microsoft’s work with the Philippine Department of Education to bring AI into classrooms, highlight how AI and data insights can be harnessed for the benefit of entire sectors, including travel.

The next generation of travellers now comes with greater expectations. The future of travel is hyper-personalized, hyper-local, and AI-powered. 

The real question is not whether the industry will get there — but whether it can move fast enough, and collaboratively enough, to keep up with its travellers.