AI and Media Are Reinventing the Travel Experience
Leading airlines, hotels, cruise lines and travel agencies are turning to AI-driven media to deliver personalized and seamless customer journeys. Analogous to how Amazon turned product pages into ad inventory, travel brands are transforming their apps, booking engines, loyalty programs and digital assistants into media networks. Powered by AI, this development has reinvented how travel companies monetize, market and serve customers.
The traditional travel funnel, which consists of awareness, consideration, booking, experience and loyalty, is no longer a linear path. The rise of AI continues to compress and personalize the traveler journey. AI systems find and recommend relevant travel offers, build itineraries, finalize reservations and deliver tailored experiences, all based on user’s preferences and history. Post-trip, an analysis of behavioral data retargets customers, optimizes rewards and refines future offers. The result is a loop, not a funnel, where every interaction feeds into the next interaction.
At the center of this transformation is commerce media. Often used interchangeably with retail media, commerce media embeds targeted ads in both physical and digital properties to influence purchasing decisions. By embedding AI-driven advertising directly into these properties and the traveler journey, travel brands can convert precise moments of engagement into incremental revenue. In contrast to the travel sector’s historically low-margin profile, commerce media is growing faster than almost any other form of advertising at ~22%1, with operating margins ranging from 50%–70%2. In turn, global commerce media advertising spending will surpass $165 billion by 20261, adding $1.3 trillion to enterprise values in the U.S. alone2.
For travel brands, AI is what makes commerce media scalable. AI-enabled advertising is projected to account for more than 94% of global digital ad revenue by 20293. For the travel industry, this estimation will be led by agentic AI systems, which are capable of independently planning and executing travel-related decisions. As these systems begin to make more choices on behalf of consumers, the commerce media landscape will adapt to not only persuade people directly but also to influence the agents acting for them. With rich first-party data, travel brands are well positioned to deliver optimized advertising experiences.
As the integration of AI and commerce media evolves, travelers might barely notice this transformation. Nonetheless, they will be served exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. Consumers get personalized, frictionless journeys and marketers will be able to better quantify precisely how, when and why their ads are working. This shift signals a new era in which travel brands are not just participants in the media economy but are instead a major component of its infrastructure.
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