Question
How big is the gap between travellers and the travel industry on AI?
Short answer
Roughly two years, by the publisher's own framing. 54% of travellers plan with AI; 22% of destinations offer it. 72% of destination leaders say two more years of inaction risks irrelevance.
- DMO leaders who see irrelevance risk within two years72%
Sojern · April 2026 · Global
- Travellers who would use an AI trip planner on a destination website63%
Sojern · April 2026 · United States
- US travellers who have used AI to plan a trip54%
Sojern · April 2026 · United States
- DMOs offering AI trip planning on their website22%
Sojern · April 2026 · Global
Sojern titled its 2026 study 'Travelers Are Two Years Ahead of the Travel Industry on AI', and the paired survey design is what makes the claim checkable rather than rhetorical: travellers and DMO leaders, same instrument, same month.
The gap is 32 points on current use and 41 points on stated demand against available supply. Those are not projections; they are two measurements taken at the same time.
Awareness is not the bottleneck. 72% of DMO leaders name the risk explicitly. 26% have written a strategy. The constraint is execution capacity, which is a budget and skills problem rather than a belief problem.
The asymmetry is what makes this urgent rather than merely interesting. Traveller adoption compounds on its own; institutional adoption requires a decision, a budget cycle and a procurement process.