Hotels
Holiday homes
Airlines
Destinations
Travel agencies
Cruises
Car hire
Financial institutions
Activities
Find out how Expedia Group’s AI tools can empower advisors with better insights and help partners grow like never before.
BLOG POST
The AI Trust Gap: Why travellers will continue to choose trusted brands
Sixty-eight percent of travellers still prefer to book with a trusted travel brand over AI platforms
Travellers don't have a technology problem with AI. They have a trust problem.
AI is already transforming how people plan and discover travel, making research faster, recommendations more relevant and inspiration easier to find. But when it's time to actually book, curiosity with AI gives way to caution.
In our new study, The AI Trust Gap*, we surveyed travellers across the US, UK and India to understand how AI is shaping planning, booking and in-trip behaviour. The takeaway is clear: travellers aren't interested in booking a trip through an AI chatbot and what's holding them back isn't model quality or features. It's trust.
Travellers trust AI to suggest, not decide
Travellers are increasingly comfortable using AI in a supporting role. As the research shows:
- 53% are comfortable letting AI suggest options
- 42% would use AI to monitor prices and determine the best time to book
- 40% would use AI help build itineraries
But there is a firm line between discovery and buying: 66% of people said they wouldn't trust AI to buy or book anything on their behalf.
A traveller might use AI to plan a week in Italy, surfacing destinations, comparing areas or mapping out a day-by-day itinerary. But when it's time to enter payment details or change flights or a hotel reservation mid-trip, they turn to a platform they trust.
Travel is a high-stakes industry, where a single mistake could cost thousands of dollars or worse, ruin a long-awaited family holiday. When something goes wrong, travellers don't get that experience, time or money back.
Trust is the real barrier to AI booking
The hesitation travellers have with booking something through an AI chatbot or agent isn't about whether it can make the booking. It's about whether it can be trusted.
Travellers point to three main concerns about AI buying on their behalf:
- Loss of control (57%)
- Data privacy (57%)
- Misuse of personal data (56%)
Even as AI becomes more embedded in everyday life, travel booking behaviour is still anchored in trust. For example:
- Just 8% of travellers rely on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini when planning a trip
- 59% still use search engines
- 49% use an online travel agency (OTA)
This gap highlights an important shift: AI is becoming a powerful discovery tool, but it hasn't replaced the need for trusted travel platforms.
The role of trust in the AI era
The reason that AI hasn't replaced the need for travel platforms is because trust in travel goes beyond surfacing information. It's about accountability across the whole journey – from discovery and booking to support if something changes.
Travellers want to know:
- If something goes wrong, who fixes it
- If plans change, what flexibility they have
- If they're getting the best options for their budget
AI chatbots and agents can generate answers. But in travel, accuracy and accountability are the ultimate currency.
This isn't surprising to us. AI chatbots excel at low-stakes tasks like summarisation, but they can't call a hotel at 2am to fix a booking error, rebook after a cancellation or advocate for a traveller if something goes wrong mid-trip — only a trusted travel brand can. That's not a limitation of technology. It's a limitation of not having dedicated supplier relationships and operational infrastructure behind it.
What this means for the industry
For the travel industry, this creates a challenge and an opportunity. Travellers are starting to plan their trips in new places: AI assistants, conversational search, social media. But they're still only booking and managing their trips where trust is strongest. This fragmentation makes distribution more complex but also more important across the full journey.
The opportunity lies in offering innovative AI-powered experiences at every stage of the traveller journey while being the trusted place they discover, book, manage and complete their trips.
What this means for partners
Trust in travel isn't built through technology alone. It's built through real world relationships and assets, strong customer support and decades of deep industry knowledge. That kind of foundation takes time to build.
By connecting supply to a broad and growing network of AI chatbots and agents, along with traditional channels, we help partners reach travellers wherever they start their journey while ensuring consistency, accuracy and control over how their inventory appears.
That includes:
- Maintaining high-quality, structured content that performs well in AI chatbots and agents
- Ensuring pricing, availability and policies for our supply partners are represented accurately
- Supporting seamless booking and servicing from the time the traveller books to after they return home
In other words, combining the reach of AI chatbots and agents with the reliability of our trusted marketplace.
Trust will define the next phase of AI in travel
Travel demand isn't going anywhere. But how travellers plan and book are evolving quickly. AI will continue to reshape how travellers discover, book and experience trips. But in high-stakes categories like travel, trust will determine where transactions happen. The companies that win won't just deliver smarter recommendations. They'll deliver confidence at every step of the journey.
Keep up to date
Sign up to let us know whether you’d like to be notified about future blog content.
Xavi Amatriain
Chief AI & Data Officer, Expedia Group
Xavi Amatriain is Expedia Group's inaugural Chief AI and Data Officer. With over 20 years of experience building large-scale AI products and solutions, he is best known for his groundbreaking work at Netflix where he started and led the ML Algorithms team behind Netflix's recommendation system, driving major business impact and pioneering large-scale ML-driven personalisation in media. Dr. Amatriain most recently served as VP of Product for AI and Compute Enablement (ACE) at Google, leading AI internal products and frameworks used across Google AI teams all the way from Google Cloud to Google Deepmind.
Was this page helpful?
Tell us how we did so we can improve our site.
Recommended for you
*The AI Trust Gap research, which was commissioned by YouGov on behalf of Expedia Group, surveyed more than 5,700 adults across the US, U.K. and India from March 10-25, 2026. The study explored attitudes towards AI across the full travel journey, including planning, booking and in-trip support, as well as trust, concerns and future expectations.