Travel Agents: 44% of Travelers Would Now Choose an AI Agent (How 1 Team Survived the Cut)
AI trip planners are replacing human travel agents as 44% of travelers would now trust AI over people. Here’s how to stay employed.
The Threat
AI is attacking the travel agent role on two fronts: direct-to-consumer AI trip planners and AI-embedded booking platforms. Consumer tools like **ChatGPT/GPT‑4**, **Microsoft Copilot**, and **Google’s AI-enhanced Flight/Hotel Search** now build full itineraries, optimize routes, and surface dynamic prices in a single prompt, eliminating the need for a human to research across dozens of sites.[1][2] In 2025, **42% of travelers** were already using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT or Copilot for itinerary planning, with over **60% of Gen Z and Millennials** relying on these tools for planning or inspiration.[2] At the platform layer, OTAs and suppliers are wiring AI directly into search and booking flows: Google’s AI-powered travel experiences proactively surface price drops, alternative dates, and better-value routes without human intervention.[1] Meanwhile, travel brands that do invest in AI are using genAI engines for predictive modeling, personalization, and automated customer service, shrinking the demand for human agents in front- and back-office roles.[3] As more travelers say they would let an **AI travel agent** plan their trip—already **44%** in recent US surveys—traditional agents are being systematically routed out of the workflow.[3][4]
Real Example
In 2024, **Booking.com** (Amsterdam, Netherlands) expanded its AI Trip Planner—built on OpenAI’s GPT‑4—from a US test to multiple markets, integrating it directly into its app to handle research, recommendations, and route optimization that historically justified a human travel advisor’s fee.[4] Internal briefings highlighted that AI-driven self-service deflected large volumes of pre-booking and support queries, allowing the company to reassign or phase out portions of human support and advisory work. While Booking.com does not publish a travel-agent headcount, similar large-scale AI service deployments in travel call centers have reduced live-agent workloads by **25–40%**, leading to hiring freezes and role consolidations.[3] The brutal reality: every query answered by AI is one less revenue-producing interaction for a human consultant. The same pattern is visible at **Expedia Group** (Seattle, USA), which launched an integrated AI trip planner and GPT‑powered travel assistant across Expedia and Hotels.com.[4] By plugging genAI into its loyalty data, search history, and inventory, Expedia shifted trip discovery, comparison, and even post-booking support into an automated channel. That means fewer reasons for a traveler to ever talk to a human agent. To see how fast this can move across industries, look at **corporate T&E**: major global firms have embedded AI assistants in tools like SAP Concur and Navan to auto-enforce policy, recommend compliant itineraries, and handle rebooking. Once CFOs saw AI cut support tickets and improve compliance, many travel management companies stopped replacing outgoing agents and pushed remaining staff into exception handling and account management only.
Impact
• **Jobs at risk:** Global consulting analyses indicate that **20–30% of routine travel advisor and booking roles** are highly automatable by genAI and workflow automation this decade, with AI-based travel agents already trusted by **44%** of US travelers and **79%** believing they will save them money.[3][4] • **Salary vs AI cost:** A full-time US travel agent earning around **$46,000–$55,000** in total annual compensation can now be partially replaced by an AI stack (LLM API + orchestration + support tooling) that delivers comparable planning capacity for a fraction of the cost per itinerary, especially at OTA scale. • **Industries affected:** Retail leisure agencies, online travel agencies, cruise and tour wholesalers, corporate travel management companies, and luxury concierge services are all shifting core planning and servicing tasks to genAI-driven interfaces.[1][2][3] • **Fastest-disappearing positions:** Frontline call-center agents handling simple bookings, junior leisure travel advisors, back-office fare and schedule research roles, and basic customer-support agents are being automated first as AI handles search, FAQs, and rebooking flows.[1][3] • **Geographic/demographic impact:** Digital-native travelers are accelerating the shift—over **60% of Gen Z and Millennials** already use AI tools for planning or inspiration, versus as low as **10–44%** among older travelers, putting younger, online-oriented markets in North America and Europe on the front line of displacement.[2][4]
The Skill Fix
The **corporate travel survivors at a leading TMC didn’t just ‘learn AI’ – they rebuilt themselves as exception-handling strategists and AI orchestrators.** At one global travel management company that rolled out an AI copilot to handle standard bookings, many front-line agents faced redundancy. The ones who kept—and even improved—their roles made four specific shifts: 1. **Exception Engineering & Irregular Ops Mastery – they owned the 10% AI couldn’t handle.** Survivors specialized in complex, multi-leg international trips, group travel, high-risk destinations, and last-minute disruption management (IRROPs). They became the go-to experts when flights were grounded, visas denied, or policies conflicted—situations where AI-generated options still needed human judgment. 2. **AI Workflow Design – they became the people who tell the AI what to do.** Instead of manually building itineraries, they learned to design prompt templates, rules, and approval flows around GPT‑4/Copilot so that thousands of routine bookings could be automated safely. They worked with product and IT teams to calibrate when the AI could auto-ticket versus when to escalate. 3. **Data-Driven Account Management – they moved closer to the revenue.** Survivors shifted into client-facing roles, using AI-augmented analytics dashboards to advise corporate clients on spend optimization, traveler satisfaction, and policy design. They stopped being order-takers and started being consultants with numbers. 4. **Content & Experience Curation – they did what generic models can’t.** They focused on hyper-specific niche expertise—luxury wellness retreats, highly customized FIT itineraries, sustainability-focused trips—and created curated, human-tested packages that fed better prompts and training data back into the AI. The emerging pattern: **AI handles the standard trip; humans who survive design the workflow, manage the edge cases, and sell higher-value experiences.**
Action Step
Your **30-Day Action Plan:** 1. **Take a targeted free AI-for-travel course.** Enroll this week in a free or low-cost intro to generative AI for business (for example, “Generative AI for Business” or “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT” on Coursera/edX) and apply every module specifically to travel workflows: research, policy enforcement, ticket changes, and supplier comparisons. 2. **Redesign one workflow at your current job with AI.** Pick a painful, repetitive task—quote generation, basic itinerary drafts, or FAQ responses—and prototype an AI-assisted version using ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini. Document time saved, error reductions, and customer response, then present a one-page before/after to your manager. 3. **Specialize where AI is weakest.** Choose a niche—complex corporate policy management, groups/MICE travel, luxury FIT, or high-risk destinations—and start building a portfolio of 5–10 case studies that show how you handled issues AI alone would likely mishandle (visas, edge-case fare rules, multi-GDS challenges). 4. **Rewrite your LinkedIn and resume around AI and outcomes.** Add bullets like “Designed AI-assisted itinerary workflow reducing quote time by 40%” or “Leveraged genAI tools to manage complex multi-leg trips with 98% satisfaction.” Use keywords such as “genAI,” “workflow automation,” and “AI-augmented customer experience” so recruiters searching for hybrid roles can find you. Pro move: quietly build a small playbook of tested prompts, tools, and workflows you can take with you—this becomes your portable asset in any future layoff. The brutal reality: if your value is still “I can find flights and hotels,” you are already competing with free AI. If your value becomes “I design and oversee the AI that runs travel,” you stay in the room when cuts come.