Source: Mauricio
When travelers use AI to plan trips, they bypass traditional travel search and comparison altogether—71% go directly to operators to book. AI has collapsed the discovery-to-purchase funnel into a single decision point. This threatens metasearch platforms and OTA aggregators whose business model depends on capturing attention in the middle of the buying journey. If AI becomes the trusted planning layer, the competitive battle moves upstream to whose operators get recommended first, not downstream to who wins clicks on comparison pages.