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BLOG POST
The AI Trust Gap: Why travelers will continue to choose trusted brands
Sixty-eight percent of travelers still prefer to book with a trusted travel brand over AI platforms
Travelers 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 travelers across the US, UK, and India to understand how AI is shaping planning, booking, and in-trip behavior. The takeaway is clear: travelers 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.
Travelers trust AI to suggest, not decide
Travelers 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 traveler might use AI to plan a week in Italy, surfacing destinations, comparing neighborhoods, 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 vacation. When something goes wrong, travelers don’t get that experience, time, or money back.
Trust is the real barrier to AI booking
The hesitation travelers 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.
Travelers 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 behavior is still anchored in trust. For example:
- Just 8% of travelers 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.
Travelers 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 summarization, but they can't call a hotel at 2am to fix a booking error, rebook after a cancellation, or advocate for a traveler 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. Travelers 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 traveler 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 travelers 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 traveler 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 travelers plan and book are evolving quickly. AI will continue to reshape how travelers 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.
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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 personalization 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.
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*The AI Trust Gap research, which was commissioned by YouGov on behalf of Expedia Group, surveyed more than 5,700 adults across the U.S., U.K., and India from March 10-25, 2026. The study explored attitudes toward AI across the full travel journey, including planning, booking, and in-trip support, as well as trust, concerns, and future expectations.