Airlines, agencies and distribution

The supply side of travel distribution is further along than the consumer-facing side. Four in five agencies have already implemented AI and the remaining fifth plan to; around half of executives across industries report AI agents running in production.

The constraint is not model capability. It is plumbing. Nine in ten agencies work across four or more booking systems and half across seven or more, which is exactly the condition under which an agent cannot reason reliably about availability, price or policy.

This is why the vendor research converges on the same prescription: simple granular APIs, clean domain context and governance built in from the start, rather than a chat layer bolted onto a fragmented stack.