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Blog on tourism and artificial intelligence

What artificial intelligence is really changing in travel agencies, hotels and tour operators. No hype, no brochure promises.

Tourism and technology

Copilots for vacation rental managers: 2026 comparison

Between March and July 2026, four vacation rental software providers launched their own 'AI copilot': Key Data (Dex AI), RentalReady (Maia, already covered in the MCP connector article), Conduit (no-code agents) and Hostaway (AI CoHost). An entire category is born in four months. None of them sells more apartments for you — they all help you manage the ones you already have. The difference between them lies in what they automate and what portfolio size they're built for.

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Future of tourism

Spanish tourism's first big AI layoff

On 18 June 2026, Lastminute Group announced a layoff plan affecting 163 people at Rumbo, its Spanish brand — 34% of its workforce in Madrid — as part of a worldwide cut of around 25% of staff. The company explicitly links it to its shift toward an AI-supported operation. It is the first Spanish case with a name, a figure and a declared cause. There is also a second cause, mentioned far less often: Lastminute fell into losses in the second quarter of 2026.

6 min read

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Tourism and technology

MCP reaches vacation rentals: your software talks to ChatGPT

In June 2026, two vacation rental software providers —Beyond and RentalReady— launched MCP servers two weeks apart: ChatGPT and Claude can now plug straight into your pricing, bookings, tasks and reviews. The wave hotels rode in 2025 reaches the vacation rental vertical a year later. With one nuance almost nobody is explaining: these connectors are there for you to question your own data, not for the assistant to discover you and sell for you. They are two different things, and they get confused constantly.

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Future of tourism

2026, the year travel AI went into production

Between March and July 2026, travel AI stopped being announced and started being installed: Canary sold the agent builder instead of the agent, Minor unified its data across 63 countries before deploying anything, Oracle put AI free inside the leading PMS, Lighthouse launched a commercial agent with traceability down to the source data, and Amadeus summed it up without decoration: what separates 2026 from 2025 is large-scale production. The challenge is no longer to prove it works; it is to industrialise it without breaking anything.

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Tourism and technology

ChatGPT ads for hotels: what they cost and if they pay off

OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT on 9 February 2026, and travel was among the pilot verticals from the start. They appear labelled as sponsored and separated from the answer, which OpenAI commits not to alter, and they show on the Free and Go plans — Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu carry no advertising. In May came the self-serve Ads Manager, with no minimum spend: a business in the available markets can advertise now, Spain included since 31 August 2026. The question stopped being whether you can and became whether you should, before the organic work is done.

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Future of tourism

Direct booking in ChatGPT: what options a hotel has

In March 2026, Lighthouse launched The Hotels Network app inside ChatGPT, presented as the first direct booking route for individual hotels in the chat, on a flat subscription and with zero commission per booking. Until then, the only ones there were the big platforms and the odd chain with its own app, such as Accor. It runs on MCP, requires no changes to the website or the PMS, and shifts one specific thing: answers about your hotel stop being built from third-party listings and start using your content and your rates. What it does not shift is who aggregates the demand.

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Tourism and technology

Google's GEO doctrine: “good SEO is good GEO”

In June 2026, a Google vice-president summed up the company's official position in a single sentence: “good SEO is good GEO”. Its generative AI features lean on the same ranking systems as always, so there is no need for a new strategy or special files such as llms.txt. That is largely true for Google Search, and it is also the version that suits a company living off search advertising. The nuance Google is under no obligation to give you: its doctrine describes Google, not ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, which are half the shop window. And on llms.txt, none of them has confirmed that it uses the file.

7 min read

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Future of tourism

AI and travel predictions 2026-2030: who says what

Predictions about AI and travel range from enthusiasm (agents executing 30% of bookings by 2030, per the IDC projection cited across the industry) to scepticism (AI traffic is very small and stable, per Booking's CFO). Both camps publish numbers; the difference lies in distinguishing projections from measurements, checking who speaks and with what incentive. This article lines up the dated predictions — and commits to reviewing them every year.

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Tourism and technology

GDPR and AI on your travel website: 5 real-case decisions

Integrating AI into a travel website without GDPR trouble comes down to five decisions: consent that actually blocks (measurement scripts don't load until accepted), storing the minimum possible data, warning in plain language that text is processed with AI, naming providers without exposing technical architecture, and never pasting customers' personal data into public tools. I tell it from my own case: the Prompting Genie, a free AI tool I have in production.

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Future of tourism

Phase 0 of travel: when it all starts in a conversation

The classic five-phase travel model (dream, plan, book, enjoy, share) has grown a preceding phase: the conversation with an AI or discovery on social media. In the United States, extensive use of AI for planning jumped from 13% to 30% in one year (Skift Research, published by McKinsey in November 2025) and traditional travel search fell from 51% to 36% (Phocuswright, 2026).

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Tourism and technology

A travel website in 5 languages, no plugins: lessons learned

A well-built multilingual website needs four things no plugin gives you for free: its own URL per language, reciprocal hreflang tags with x-default, translated slugs decided before publishing, and human review of translations. I explain it from a real case — my own website in Spanish, English, French, Catalan and Italian, served as static HTML with near-zero maintenance cost.

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Future of tourism

78% use AI, 6% have a strategy, 22% have the data

The hotel industry is buying AI faster than it prepares to use it: 78% of chains deploy it but only 6% have a corporate strategy and only 22% have a centralised data structure capable of supporting it (h2c, 2025). Meanwhile, 4 out of 5 independent hotels lose 1-2 working days a week consolidating reports across disconnected systems. Hotel AI's brake is not the technology: it is the data.

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Future of tourism

The Spanish traveller and AI: age, income and family

35% of Spanish travellers use AI for travel (Simon-Kucher, 2025) and 28% use generative AI to plan (LLYC and Appinio, 2026). The fine-grained picture surprises: the leading segment is not Gen Z but families with children (31.3%), and income discriminates more than age — from 21.6% in low-income households to 44.6% in high-income ones. Spain runs ahead of France (24%) but far behind China (81%).

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Tourism and technology

What is MCP and why all of travel is building a server

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol connecting AI models to external systems — booking engines, PMSs, databases — and in 2026 it consolidated as travel's de facto standard: adopters range from Sabre to SiteMinder. It solves the underlying problem: a hotel's website exposes only 5-10% of its operational information, and assistants need live data to answer with certainty.

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Future of tourism

The Booking paradox: record revenue, falling profit

Booking closed 2025 with record revenue of 22.82 billion euros (+13.4%) and a net profit 8% lower (4.58 billion), according to its official results. The causes: 770 million extra in marketing — mostly Google — and a 388-million write-down of its metasearch engine Kayak, damaged by AI search. The OTA that charges hotels commissions pays, in turn, a structural toll to Google, just as Google starts competing with it.

3 min read

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Tourism and technology

Chatbot or AI agent: the difference that decides your sales

The practical difference between a chatbot and an AI agent is that the chatbot tells you how to book while the agent books: it sets goals, plans and executes multi-step tasks with little supervision. Spain already has cases with figures — RIU's assistant handles 75% of more than 1,500 daily queries — and a three-level ladder lets you place any system in minutes.

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Future of tourism

The hotel AI cases with ROI you can actually believe

Hotel AI cases with results verified by independent sources can be counted on one hand: Wyndham (−25% handling time across its AI toolset, quarterly results, 2025), Hyatt (almost +20% group sales productivity, stated in its own 2026 results) and Hotel Tech Report's revenue benchmarks (+15-20% RevPAR, across more than 4,800 hoteliers). Almost everything else is vendor data: quotable, but with a label.

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Tourism and technology

There is no "your ChatGPT ranking": 28,600 answers

There is no stable 'position' in AI answers: across 28,600 AI answers, the top recommended hotel changed in 40% of same-day repetitions of the same query, and the five big platforms agree on the number one only 8.9% of the time (Kollective, full report, July 2026). The useful metric is not a point-in-time position but consistency of appearance per platform over time.

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Future of tourism

Agentic booking timeline: 19 months that changed travel

Between January 2025 and August 2026, AI travel booking went from demo to reality: Booking and Expedia apps inside ChatGPT, the first flight booked entirely in a chat (Mindtrip with Sabre and PayPal, May 2026), OpenAI's checkout retreat and a Google hotel booking test in AI Mode. The lesson of so many twists: the real battle is not who charges for the sale, but who controls discovery — and OpenAI is already monetising it with ads.

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Future of tourism

Will AI destroy tourism jobs? What the data says

Documented AI-driven job cuts in tourism have so far hit corporate and support roles — Accor expects AI to replace up to 40% of its office jobs, Mews laid off 15% of staff — while customer-facing employment holds up: travel agent was Spain's fastest-growing profession according to LinkedIn (2025), though it no longer appears on the 2026 list. There is no single narrative: there are three at once.

4 min read

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Future of tourism

90% plan their trip with AI. Only 2% let it pay

Around 90% of consumers want to plan trips with AI, but only 2% to 7% would let it book and pay autonomously, as Booking.com, Skift, McKinsey and Accenture all found in 2026. The gap is not technological but one of trust: AI still cannot guarantee verified data or answer for mistakes when something goes wrong.

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Tourism and technology

Can an AI agent read your website? A 7-point checklist

AI assistant crawlers don't execute JavaScript, agents give up when they hit captchas and long forms, and a hotel's website typically exposes only 5-10% of its real operational information. This 7-point checklist lets you verify in one afternoon whether your site is readable — and usable — by the AIs that already recommend and are starting to book travel.

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