The 2026 Guide to Enabling Agentic AI in the Travel Business

The travel and hospitality industry is standing at the edge of a massive technological revolution. By 2030, an IDC prediction indicates that AI agents will be responsible for 30% of all travel bookings. Reflecting this massive shift, the global market for AI in the hospitality industry is expected to grow from $0.23 billion in 2025 to $2.28 billion by 2030. Modern travelers do not want to look through fifty tabs to put together an itinerary anymore. Consequently, there is a fundamental shift from "search engines," which merely show options, to "answer engines," which actively make decisions. According to Phocuswright's research, more than 60% of surveyed travel businesses are already testing or scaling agentic AI.

Here is how tourism and hospitality brands can leverage this technology to transform their operations.

From "Chat" to "Transaction"

Over the past decade, travel chatbots were primarily made to answer questions and deflect calls. While generative AI acts like an advisor, agentic AI operates like a "direct report" that gets things done. This evolution marks a transition from "Chat" (giving information) to "Transaction" (doing business). For example, an agentic system does not just tell you when the pool is open; it also books your cabana, charges your folio, and confirms your lunch reservation all at once. During a flight cancellation caused by bad weather, an agentic AI system can find out about the issue through real-time data feeds, check corporate travel policies, and automatically navigate the Global Distribution System (GDS) to rebook the next available flight. 

Driving Revenue via Hyper-Personalization

Agentic AI's hyper-personalization creates a "silent seller" that operates continuously throughout the guest's journey. Agents link different systems, like PMS, CRM, and POS, so they can see the whole picture of how valuable a guest is. When guests are satisfied with a high level of hyper-personalization, they are more likely to pay for higher-margin ancillaries, such as spa services, dining, and upgrades, at the right moment. This strategic capability ensures personalization transforms from a cost center into a profit center.

Escaping the "Legacy Trap"

A significant barrier for travel enterprises is the "Legacy Trap," which is the idea that you have to tear down and replace old systems to use modern AI. Many travel companies still rely on GDS mainframes that are decades old and do not have modern RESTful APIs. However, agentic AI allows businesses to modernize without moving. Trustify Technology's AI experts use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Agentic AI to fill in this gap. By utilizing RPA and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), they construct an intelligent wrapper around legacy systems. This grants the new AI agents the ability to seamlessly "read and write" to older systems just as a human operator would, allowing a 30-year-old PMS to work as part of a cutting-edge, real-time digital experience.

Brand Safety and "Glass Box" Engineering

In a regulated business like travel, making decisions without clear reasons is not okay. To solve the "Black Box" problem, the industry must transition to "Glass Box" engineering. Trustify Technology helps set up full "Observability Pipelines" that record the agent's "Thought Chain," which is the step-by-step reasoning process it utilized to get to a conclusion. Furthermore, "Black Box Recorders" ensure that every input, reasoning step, API call, and output is recorded in a locked ledger with a date and time stamp, ensuring complete traceability for GDPR compliance. To maintain financial integrity, Policy-as-Code is incorporated straight into the agent's operating system. This establishes stringent guidelines, such as capping autonomous refunds at $50, superseding any "creative" decisions the language model might make.

The Human-in-the-Loop Future

Ultimately, replacing all human teams with AI is a detrimental business model and carries too much risk. Successful travel operations will use a "Human-in-the-Loop" (HITL) architecture where AI and human knowledge work together all the time. By allowing agentic AI to perfectly handle the "science" of travel distribution and operations, travel businesses can free up their human workers to learn and execute the "art" of hospitality.