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On Monday’s Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast, Wil Slickers, Michael Goldin, Brandreth Canaley, and Jamie Lane break down where AI is actually reshaping travel and why booking may not be the biggest battleground.
From new Google translation tools removing friction on the ground to early signals around AI-driven pricing frameworks, the conversation centers on how AI is embedding itself into the travel experience rather than replacing transactions.
They also touch on how these trends are beginning to impact different parts of the travel industry from real-world constraints like Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staffing challenges to changing consumer behavior as Gen Z treats travel more like a flexible purchase.
They also look at how hotel groups are evolving into platform ecosystems through partnerships like Hilton and YOTEL, as the episode zooms out on a bigger question: if AI owns discovery and experience, who actually owns the traveler?
Watch This Episode Transcript of This ConversationThis transcript is generated by artificial intelligence.
Good morning.
Happy Monday.
Best day of the week.
Yes, it is. It’s so great to see your beautiful faces this morning. How are you guys doing?
We’re good.
We missed you last week.
I know, slight medical emergency.
Great way to start the week.
She’s back.
She’s back.
Well, welcome. Well, I guess no fun travels if you’re dealing with last-minute medical.
No, it was one of those things where you go to urgent care, because you’re like, maybe if I handle this right now, and they were like, there’s nothing we can do. I’m like, sweet.
But I actually was just in New York this weekend, and Thursday to Sunday, two of my friends got booked to play a really famous club in Brooklyn. So a whole bunch of us went to go support them. It was really fun.
Brandy, I feel like you’ve wrapped your entire identity around travel.
Oh, well, that ties really well into something that we’re going to talk about later.
And yes, it is a main core tenet of my personality. And in no way does that make me a cringey millennial.
But yeah, it’s actually I’ve, I have been trying to when I moved to Boston, I booked myself up for like six months straight because I was just trying to keep myself busy.
And then as I’m coming to the tail end of that six months, I’m like, I need to stay home. So every other weekend at minimum, I’m blocking off like I’m in Boston.
Didn’t you just tell us pre-show you’re off to Mexico City this weekend, right after New York?
I have a gap weekend this weekend, and then I’m going to Mexico City.
Sticks to your guns.
Yeah, exactly. Plans may change.
Well, good news on travel stuff, we think. Jamie, is it going to be a little bit easier? Maybe, maybe not.
Hopefully.
So we did get an announcement. Well, there was so much news last week on TSA funding. So it was like the Senate passed a bill, and then the House rejected it, and then the House put forward something, and then the Senate was wasn’t going to pass it.
And then Trump just signed an executive order that he was going to fund TSA anyway. So I don’t really get the infighting that’s happening of like, whether they want to fund it or not.
But it looks like we’re going to have funding for TSA starting sometime this week, that employees might get paid. But I do have a fun stat of the week related to TSA. And it is $17.8 million.
Is that the number of passengers that traveled this week, last week?
The number of hours people waited in line.
That’s a good one.
I need to stop sharing the charts on the group chat. Brandreth, you are right.
I read the WhatsApp chat this morning.
So through the… And I thought this was a fun theme. So maybe and absolutely we need to pay the TSA agents.
But what I thought was so surprising when you go back and analyze what the impact has been so far of this shutdown or non-paying a government shutdown and not paying TSA workers and all the negative news we’ve seen about traveling and we’ve talked
about over the past month because it has been a pretty impactful month now for travel and especially air travel. Last week, TSA throughput, so the number of passengers going through US airports was actually up by 1.6 percent.
So yeah, well, what I thought was really interesting about that graph is that there’s really 2026 is almost exactly following 2025. Like there was just like a couple of week blips where there’s a difference that’s like noticeable on a line chart.
So that’s true.
Fortune favors the bold. So good on you, travelers.
Well, and then also I think like, okay, so I’m traveling for work this week and it’s like, I’m going like unless the flight gets canceled for some reason. So there’s people when you have to travel, you’re like, I’m brave.
And if you’ve booked a trip months in advance, you’re not going to be like, well, the lines might be long, now I’m not going to go. You know, like you’re going to just buckle up and see what happens.
Right. But there is a lot of airline travel, especially that gets booked last minute. I’m business travelers, I’m people doing last minute trips.
And the fact that so full year travels up our TSA throughputs up 1.6%. And last week was in line with that, that we didn’t see any major pullback with all this negative news and four-hour lines that we were talking about last week.
It’s pretty awesome. Or at least that travel is that resilient, that people are willing to wait in those lines and to make those trip happen.
Maybe I don’t know enough about politics, but why not just sign this from the start?
Yeah. Well, they do this because there’s one thing that’s going to cause a lot of pain, and then they attach that to controversial things they want to pass through.
So, it’s like, it should, I realize, I would say this should just be its own separate thing to keep the airports running, but you know what? They didn’t come to us and ask for like what we think should be happening.
So, we’re here, advisory board, government, just let us know. Yeah.
It’s not part of the docket today, but Rafat did have a good, I think there’s another out bad that came out over the weekend of just like how weak the travel and tourism lobbies have been during all this of essentially, anytime there’s some good
news, they’ll support it, like house passes something, support it, Senate passes something, support it, Trump signed something, support it, but not going out to begin with of like, guys, we got to just stop this infighting and get something done,
like this supports 10% of the US economy. We cannot be using it as a chip to debate this. Yeah.
Well, I think that’s a really interesting point because in a lot of our discussions over the years, travel just gets like taken for granted.
Like when we’re talking about a lot of stuff in Florida where they’re trying to pass regulations and things, and like, do you realize how much of like, of the economy is propped up by this or in Colorado?
And it’s like, the contribution to the economy, I guess, as an industry, like we’re just not selling that message effectively enough because it just is, it always seems like it’s the thing that’s getting hammered on, you know?
Well, it’s biting the hand that feeds. I mean, we see this all over Europe where people want to simply stop tourism and overtourism. People don’t want them coming in their backyard, but then, you know, 25% of the entire…
I’m making this up. Jamie might know the real number. 25% of the entire Spanish economy is tourism based.
And so just say, Alex, we don’t want any tourists coming anymore. Yeah, it’s like it’s not a fully educated decision.
Yeah. Well, speaking of traveler behavior and a call back to some earlier mentions of cringy millennial behavior, Paul Manzi in the comments says, if you’re going to be a cringy millennial, you’ve got to own it. And I do.
I am a cringy millennial and I am proud. So another great article came out about this shift between Gen Z behavior and millennial behavior when it comes to traveling.
And obviously, Gen Z is the next big generation that’s going to have a significant economic impact and impact on travel. And for millennials, a lot of us went through college really during the boom of study abroad.
And obviously, the rise of Instagram and social media and sharing all this travel content, and it really does become an identity.
Absolutely every cringy person is like, oh, when I lived in Barcelona, and you were there for three months and you don’t speak Spanish. But then because so many people were able to have that experience, people got to travel a lot.
And it’s much more popular in Europe and in Australia to take a gap year and go through Southeast Asia or South America or whatever. But this was kind of the onset of Americans, I think, having exposure to that kind of travel in mass.
And it became something that people are willing to spend a ton of money or at least seem like they’re spending a ton of money on Instagram to go to all these places and share it and like sacrifice other things.
And I actually was just having this conversation with friends of mine this weekend about how, you know, in my 20s, I mean, I’ve been going to international weddings now, it seems like every year for the last 10 years.
And would, I mean, always say yes and always kind of book a trip. Because say, why say no? Life is worth a living and you can’t take the money with you.
And, yeah, millennial. Yeah. Really just doubling down on all the stereotypes.
But then I would make a trip kind of around it, like you’re already over there, like, let’s make a trip out of it. And I really prioritize those experiences. And I don’t like I’m so glad we did all of that.
But Gen Z, you know, really came of that sort of traveling age during COVID. So a lot of obviously those kids in college didn’t have those study abroad programs, or at least not in the same volume.
And there is, I mean, I think millennials are just kind of battered by consistent once in a generation events that were like, it doesn’t matter.
But Gen Z seems to be understandably pretty like, pretty scarred by the financial insecurity that happened during the pandemic. And is saying we still like to travel, but it is not an overwhelming and all consuming part of our personality.
Well, travel is a very important part of human nature. And I think Gen Z is missing out. Luckily, a lot of us in travel, we get to go to really cool places all the time for conferences.
And depending if you have kids or not, you add a couple days like Brandy’s saying, sometimes you fly into London on a Tuesday morning and you’re out on Thursday.
I’m the red eye to get back to help with the kids at home.
Yeah, to get home guys.
Two of us have kids, it’s important to say.
Yeah, I think travel is unequivocally part of human nature and very important.
And Glenn Fogel, booking.com CEO at their Click event, I don’t know how many years ago, but wore a quote from Mark Twain that said, travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.
And I think that’s what the world needs a little bit more of. And one of our topics here in a minute is Google Translate, their AI app and how that I can imagine is going to help a bunch. But Jinzy, all I can say is you’re missing out.
I’m with Brandy. Travel is very much part of my identity. I do not do it, consume travel like Brandy does, at the pace that she does any longer.
But in my younger years, maybe.
So one of the things I love that the Skift article pulled out was the difference between those. So they have this chart where it’s essentially, if the following scenarios become true, you have do more travel or less travel.
And there are two questions around parenthood. One is when you become a parent, and when you become a parent, you, on average, do less travel. And then when you have more children, you actually do, people say they have more leisure travel.
Explain that to me.
And I think, and one, it’s that first kid, you’re like, I need to hunker down, I need to figure this out.
And then once you start having more kids, you’re like, let’s get out, do stuff. Like, and second kid becomes easier, third kid becomes easier, fourth kid, I wouldn’t know.
But everything gets incrementally easier, and you want to get out and do stuff with them. So, and I’ve got my first international trip with the kids coming up in July. We’re taking to Iceland.
They’re super excited. I’m excited. We just paid for everything.
That felt like it needed its own financial windfall.
Iceland’s not cheap.
No, but that is such a great trip to do with younger kids. You guys are going to have a great time.
Yeah, but I’m a millennial, and that’s what we decide we want to spend our money on. I think the point of this, you have more kids, employment is stable, finances improve. Let’s go spend that money on travel.
I agree with you, Michael, that Gen Z, maybe they just need to get into that next phase of earning, and they’re now in their late 20s, early 30s, where things are expensive, and they’re out on their own.
They maybe don’t have that disposable income yet, and when they do get a financial windfall, and they’re telling us they want to save it, they want to invest it, maybe buy some Bitcoin, buy clothes, pay off debt, maybe their student loans.
And once you get past that phase, then maybe they’ll grow into their travel.
Yeah, I think one of those is super important. I think Brandy’s sounds like it was in the same boat as me.
I would spend a lot of time and money on traveling, even if I didn’t have that much money, because it was important to me, and I enjoyed it, and I think maybe the big difference now is the cost of things.
Yeah.
And Europe isn’t as cheap as it was, especially some of the areas I used to enjoy going to, where in Budapest, somebody can tell me, I haven’t been there in years, but it was like 75 cents for a beer.
The Beer Inflation Guide was how I rated how cheap or expensive cities were.
Just basically didn’t drink water.
Yeah, it’s cheaper than a liter of water. So I think they’ve got that to deal with. I don’t know if it’s still cheap or not.
I just I don’t travel the same way as I used to, but I have to assume it’s gone up pretty significantly just based on on flights.
Yeah, I think an interesting another part of this article that really stuck with me is that it’s not that Gen Z is saying, at least according to this article, that we’re foregoing Europe or that South America trip to go to like a drive-to
destination. It’s like they’re either we are going to travel and do the trip we want to do, or we’re just not doing anything at all. It seems a little bit more binary. Like they’re not doing it close to home.
They’re not shortening the trip. It’s just like yes or no. And then, which I think is, I mean, it’s understandable.
And to your point earlier, these aren’t, they’re not our age, right? They are in an earlier earning period where there is less money. We all see all the news about how the job market for graduates is a total nightmare.
So I always take a grain of salt when they’re like, this is how Gen Z is totally reshaping things. When Gen Z is 35, they might be like, yeah, we’re like the group, the bachelorette trips in Iceland.
So we just have to hope that their economic situation gets a little bit better. Maybe if things aren’t improving like that, it’s a new opportunity for the travel industry to market, drive to destinations like the budget-friendly motel.
We might just have to change the story a little bit.
Or the destination.
Yeah, exactly. Well, we can’t go an entire episode without saying the words AI. So Michael alluded to this earlier, but there is a really fun new app.
Well, it’s not really new, but Google Translate’s AI app is going to every iPhone, which this is great.
I think that I can be a little bit of a snob about this sometimes because I thought that part of the enrichment of traveling, especially when you go to places that you just do not speak the language at all, is looking it up beforehand, writing it,
trying to figure it out, but then really just struggling through that communication. But then I was thinking and I was traveling to Indonesia many years ago now, and Google Translate did exist, and I got sick, and I had to go to the pharmacy, and I
just typed everything out in Google Translate, and then I handed it to them, and then they handed it back to me. And so it worked, and I’m like, this is the next version of that.
So much better, where it just is, it’s not me frantically typing something out while I’m really ill. So I think this is great.
And for you on your trip to Iceland, Jamie, they speak perfect English, so maybe not with the whole, but I think this is really cool.
But it is, I think, the bigger point is you talk with people on why they don’t do international travel. A lot of the barrier is the perceived language barrier. It’s the perceived, like, if I get in trouble, how am I going to get help?
If I need to go to the restroom, how am I going to find it? I get to the train station, how am I going to know where to go?
And just knowing that you have that fallback of, like, that I can have them talk into my phone and get a response and know what they’re saying. It reminds me the time I went to Russia to visit my cousin.
And he just had me showing up at a train station or at a bus station. And he had written out in Russian, like, on a note and, like, sent it to me. And I was just supposed to find someone that looked nice and show it to them.
And then they were going to point me how to get to his house. But if there was that next question, I would have been screwed and wouldn’t have known.
And, like, with this app and with the how AI is evolving to make that communicate and just remove communication barriers, I think it does open up so many more destinations and so many more people to maybe taking that first leap.
But those are the travel stories that become the stories that you remember, right? I remember printing out, when I studied abroad in Germany, I printed out directions from my town to Prague, and we were driving there.
Oh, my God.
MapQuest days.
Yeah. There was navigation, but they said as soon as you change countries, it falls off. Once you leave Germany, it dies in the Czech Republic for some reason.
Similar to Jamie, when I arrived in Poland, it was like 10 PM and I didn’t have dinner that day, so I just pointed to something and it was a dessert. So that’s what I had for dinner that night. But yeah, I think those are formative experiences.
So while I love the ease that the Google Translate offers, I think you are going to miss out on some good and some bad scenarios.
Yeah, I do think, tying into Gen Z travel, and you mentioned, Michael, earlier the comment that like travel is the cure-all for basically lack of empathy in the world.
And I think that if this gets some people out and into the world, I think that’s great. And I do worry about these other generations of kids coming up that aren’t having these experiences because it totally changes your perception of the world.
So I do agree, though, like struggling through. I think some of the my most memorable stories are when things have just like absolutely blown up.
It is like when nothing when everything goes according to plan and everything is smooth, it doesn’t resonate with you. You know, you don’t remember it.
But I can tell you all of the times that something really, really bad and or crazy has happened in like absolute detail.
Yeah, there’s train station nights and airport mornings.
Oh my God.
Yeah. Crying in the Doha airport at like 3 in the a.m. That’s never happened.
That’s never happened. Certainly not to me. Also, a quick shout out again to Paul who suggested we have a Monday morning drinking game every time we mention AI.
All the power to you, Paul. I don’t know if Skift would love it if we started taking shots on air, but we’re. Get back to us.
Shots of espresso for Monday morning.
Yeah.
There we go.
There we go.
Well, our last topic today, we’ve been touching on this last week, but the Yotel Hilton co-branding deal has gone forward. This leads us to this continued conversation of blending.
We have the blending of industry, SDR and hotels, but now it’s the blending between brands. The overarching question is, are people going to be at all loyal to brands?
When they’re just mashed together, or if you book a Hilton, but it’s actually a Yotel or vice versa, whatever it is, how that allegiance is going to play? Michael, I feel like you always have opinions on loyalty. What are your thoughts?
Well, we’ve covered some of this last week, but I think the importance of brand is going to be more and more important.
That’s not the best sentence in the world. But the importance of brand will continue to be vital to the success of hospitality because of the rise of AI. We saw some data.
I don’t think we mentioned it, but Focusrite put some data out that 56 percent of travel search starts now on the LLMs. 56 percent. Where was it this time last year?
It was in the 20s or 30s. It is just gone gangbusters. With the rise of that, Jamie is in the camp of the OTAs.
I’m in the camp of probably not the OTAs or at least a leveling of the playing field. A leveling of the playing field likely indicates that brand is going to be more and more important.
Certainly, being AEO and agentic optimized is going to be crucial in the early days.
But long-term brand is going to be just as important as well as the quantities of information that you have available about your properties, matching the long-form searches that folks are doing.
The days of the quick two, three-word Google search are gone and people are being a lot more specific.
Matching with the brand identities and having Hilton collect and Marriott collect sub-brands, I think is a smart strategy for long-term for getting their inventory surfaced.
I just have to tell you, Jamie, I’m so sorry, but I am leaning more towards Michael’s camp. But I will still try to play Switzerland and moderate, but I am leaning a little bit more that way.
So is Jamie.
Yeah.
No. Jamie’s facial expression is back to the truth.
I’ll let Brandy go and then I’ll make my comment.
When I was reading this, something that stuck to me, and it’s not really like the basis of what they were talking about, and I see what you’re saying, Michael, but I was thinking, I think that the individual hotel property is going to become way more
important than the brand because I was thinking about Amman, and again, I haven’t been to one of these, even though I desperately want to. But when I think about it, there’s the difference between Ammanzo or Amangiri, the ones in Greece or Utah that
are these expansive, incredible properties versus the Amman in Miami, or they’re building the Amman in Miami, but I saw the building they were building in, and the one in New York. I wouldn’t pay the same amount of money to stay in the ones in the
city. There’s very specific, and we talk about Boutique Hotels.
When your hotel has a real personality, and that can be found via some sort of search, and you have the right social media so that people can start to visualize and plan that trip, I think that will become more important, the uniqueness of an
Yeah, so what I’ll say is that the OTAs are incredible for independent hotels to distribute their inventory, and I think that’s only gonna get better with AI sort of surfacing that.
I think ultimately, most independent hotels provide a better service than the branded chains.
Still, when you look globally, over half the hotels in the world are independent, and they’re doing incredible things, and OTAs made those independents discoverable, and I think OTAs are only gonna accelerate it.
That said, our AI is only gonna accelerate that. That said, when you look at Hilton Marriott, they see more and more that they’ve got to compete with the OTAs. Yes, they’re still partners, but OTAs are doing, spinning a lot.
And if the brands are gonna compete, if they’re going to have their own apps, and they need more properties in their portfolio, and ultimately it is the number one metric that their investors are looking at, is what is their ability to grow supply on
their platform? And this is an incredible way for them to do it, essentially not have to spend any money to buy these brands, can just let them distribute through their loyalty program, like the brands that they have.
And the biggest worry for me would be if I was an existing owner in the Hilton distribution platform of like, hey, wait, like now I’m competing with all these other hotels.
Yeah, that’s a problem.
Yeah. Are you an OTA or are you a brand?
I wonder if they have the same restrictions that like when Marriott was like, oh, you can’t be within like blah, blah, blah, blocks of a Marriott if that’s still applicable when they’re doing these deals.
Well, they signed to SLH. I mean, SLH has hundreds of properties.
Yeah, probably not.
So, yeah, I think it does. And if you’re searching for that brand by name, but the whole point is that once you’re in that distribution system, that when someone searches and you’re going to Boston, there’s a great Yotel in Boston.
I’ve stated it a ton of times. And if I was part of the, I am part of Hilton Loyalty, I’d be more likely now to stay in it, given that I’d be able to earn and burn points through it.
Yeah. Well, we will continue to see. We need to keep a running list of all of our different mini GMH feuds.
And we have like a tracker or something. Let’s see how they play out.
I’ll add one more thing to it.
As the flags do more licensing deals and look potentially more like an OTA, that’s good for the consumer because theoretically, we’re going to start seeing discounting and price cutting and hopefully price dropping over time.
But maybe that’s wishful thinking. But competition typically drives prices down. And the more competition that enters the OTA world, the better for all of us.
However, on the backside of that, the OTAs aren’t going to reduce their commissions.
The ones that will be paying for that are the operators.
And if you’re not getting as many bookings through your distribution channel, then do they have the ability to charge as much on the commission side?
So I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Well, great show today, guys. What is going on in your week ahead?
Anything fun and exciting?
So I’ll start. I took the boys on Saturday to USA Belgium. Awesome game.
The awesome first half. US really underperformed in the second half. But I’m also going to go with a buddy to see USA Portugal tomorrow night.
So to US men’s national teams, we’re getting World Cup fever here in Atlanta. Hopefully, that helps on the supply side. But it’s in getting people booking.
But yeah, some good soccer coming up.
Break out the vuvuzelas.
Oh yeah.
Good pronunciation. That’s a mouthful. How about you, Michael?
Same-all, same-all.
However, April is going to be quite hectic. I’ve got three weeks of travel in a row. So get through the next week or two and then I’ll be on the road a lot.
So I might have some uptake.
I’ll be seeing you on the road too at the end of April.
There we go.
Awesome. Well, I am going down to visit the Prime Vacations Team this week tomorrow. So quick turnaround for me, but excited to go to Florida and get some sun.
I have reached a shade of white. I have not been probably in high school. So I’m pretty pumped.
Welcome to the club.
Yeah, I’m pretty sad about it.
Thank you to everyone who tuned in today. We had so much great engagement. Paul, Alexander, Matt, I really appreciate you guys.
And Ben tuning in. Oh, sad news from Ben Stead who says that beer now costs $6 in Budapest. So that’s pretty brutal.
Thank you to everyone who tuned in to the live stream and for those of you who are listening on the download. And we will see you all next Monday.