24%
14%influencersAI assistants as a trusted travel planning source
Yes. AI assistants rank as a trusted travel planning source for 24% of consumers, against 19% for travel bloggers and 14% for social media influencers.
Booking.comApril–May 2025
Dataset last reviewed end to end
AI in travel, measured
Travellers adopted AI faster than the industry serving them. This observatory tracks the gap with numbers that carry their source, their sample and their date.
31 sources · 60 indicators
Every figure carries its publisher, sample and field period.
The adoption gap
April 202632 points apartSojern
And still moving
Phocuswright33%1H25
43%2H25
56%1H26
US travellers who used AI on at least one trip
56%US travellers who used AI on at least one trip6%Consumers who fully trust AI24%AI assistants as a trusted travel planning source22%DMOs offering AI trip planning on their website35%Largest travel companies mentioning AI in annual reports25%Travellers who received outdated or inaccurate AI travel information43%AI use for building and organising itineraries18%Travellers using generative AI to plan travel70%Tourism businesses already using AI45%Share of travel venture funding going to AI-enabled startups63%Travellers who would use an AI trip planner on a destination website~50%Travellers who still click through after an AI answer26%DMOs with a documented AI strategy56%AI use for comparing prices42%Consumers who always fact-check AI outputs~40%European NTOs with dedicated AI teams or AI monitoring40%Travellers who discovered a destination via AI63%Gen Z using AI as often as social media for trip planning
The headline numbers
The adoption gap
The adoption gap
The same month, the same question, two populations. Travellers on one side, the destinations marketing to them on the other.
54%
US travellers who have used AI to plan a trip
22%
DMOs offering AI trip planning on their website
Travellers
Your market
The United States, where the series is longest
The deepest repeated measurement in this field is American: Phocuswright has asked US travellers the same question three waves running, and Sojern fields travellers and destination organisations side by side. That is why the US figures carry the trend lines here, and why they should be read as leading rather than representative.
- US travellers who used AI on at least one trip56%
First half of 2026 · United States
- US travellers who have used AI to plan a trip54%
April 2026 · United States
- Travellers who still click through after an AI answer~50%
First half of 2026 · United States
- US travel executives reporting AI improves personalisation33%
September 2025 · United States
Every figure above comes from one of these indicators. Each one links to its publisher, field period and sample, so you can check the reading for yourself.
56%
US travellers who used AI on at least one trip
First half of 2026 · United States
54%
US travellers who have used AI to plan a trip
April 2026 · United States
~50%
Travellers who still click through after an AI answer
First half of 2026 · United States
33%
US travel executives reporting AI improves personalisation
September 2025 · United States
The headline numbers
How AI is reshaping travel, in numbers you can cite
25%
Travellers who received outdated or inaccurate AI travel information
25% of travellers report having received outdated or inaccurate travel information from AI.
Amadeus2025
35%
4%2022 annual reportsLargest travel companies mentioning AI in annual reports
35% of the Skift Travel 200 mentioned AI in their 2024 annual reports, up from about 4% in 2022.
McKinsey & Company2024 annual reports
78%
Travellers who find generative AI results helpful
78% of travellers found generative AI results somewhat or very helpful, for planning and in destination alike.
Phocuswright2025
70%
Tourism businesses already using AI
70% of tourism businesses already use AI technologies, principally chatbots, dynamic pricing and demand forecasting.
UN Tourism2025
45%
10%2023Share of travel venture funding going to AI-enabled startups
45% of travel venture capital funding went to AI-enabled startups in the first half of 2025, up from about 10% in 2023.
McKinsey & CompanyFirst half of 2025
Questions
Direct answers
Short, sourced answers to the questions people actually ask about AI and travel.
How many travellers use AI to plan trips?
Between 18% and 79%, depending on what is being asked. The defensible summary: roughly half to two-thirds of travellers have used AI somewhere in a trip, and around one in five uses generative AI specifically to plan one.
Do travellers trust AI for travel information?
They use it far more than they trust it. 6% of consumers fully trust AI, 42% always fact-check what it tells them, and 25% have received travel information from it that was outdated or wrong.
Will travellers let AI book travel for them?
Mostly not yet. About 12% are comfortable with AI making independent decisions, around 6% would let it handle most of their planning, and a quarter to a third would let it complete a booking they had already specified.
Is AI replacing search engines for travel research?
It is displacing channels rather than replacing search outright. AI assistants are now a more trusted planning source (24%) than travel bloggers (19%) or social media influencers (14%), and 69% of Millennials use AI as often as social media for trip planning.
What do travellers actually use AI for?
Researching attractions, restaurants and transport (60%), comparing prices (56%), in-trip translation (45%), building itineraries (43%) and destination research (38%). Synthesis tasks dominate; transaction tasks lag.
How many hotels and tourism businesses use AI?
Around 70% of tourism businesses use AI, mainly for chatbots, dynamic pricing and demand forecasting. But adoption is strongly size-dependent, and operational AI is not the same as being visible in AI answers.
Topics
Start from a topic
Traveller adoption
14How many people actually use AI to plan and book travel, and how fast that share is moving.
Discovery and visibility
14AI as a discovery channel: who gets recommended, who gets cited, and who disappears.
Trust and autonomy
11Enthusiasm is near-universal; delegation is not. The gap between the two is the real story.
What AI is used for
7The specific jobs travellers hand to an assistant, before, during and after a trip.
Destinations and DMOs
9National tourism organisations and destination marketers, measured against the travellers they serve.
Hotels and accommodation
4Adoption, outlook and the capability gap between chains and independents.
Airlines, agencies and distribution
8Where agentic AI is already in production, and the data fragmentation holding it back.
Economics
7What the shift is worth, where the money moves, and which claims are forecasts rather than measurements.
Governance, accuracy and risk
6What goes wrong: stale answers, unverified claims, and the policy response taking shape.
Market context
5The baseline volumes that AI-era percentages are percentages of.
Sources
Where the numbers come from
Fifteen publishers behind the figures, out of thirty-one the observatory tracks. We weigh them by how much of their method they disclose rather than publishing a grade: official statistics first, vendor research clearly labelled, aggregators used only to find primary documents.
- OECD
- Eurostat
- UN Tourism
- ISTAT
- Banca d'Italia
- World Economic Forum
- IATA
- WTTC
- European Travel Commission
- Phocuswright
- Skift Research
- McKinsey & Company
- Deloitte
- Euromonitor International
- Amadeus
- Sabre
- Booking.com
- Expedia Group
- Sojern
- Travelport
- Mastercard Economics Institute
- Tourism Economics (Oxford Economics)
- OAG
- Anthropic
- The Data Appeal Company
- Mabrian
- TourismIntel
- Officina Turistica
- Italia.it / ENIT
How we handle a number
How a figure gets into this observatory, how it is graded, and what we do when sources disagree.
MethodMachine-readable
Every page here exists as HTML, as Markdown and as JSON, and every figure carries its source in machine-readable form.
- /llms.txt
- /api/indicators.json
- append .md to any page