How artificial intelligence and technology are changing the daily work of travel agencies, hotels and tour operators, step by step.
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.
Read the articleThe 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.
Read the articleThere is no stable 'position' in AI answers: across 13,500 searches, the top recommended hotel changed in 45% of same-day repetitions of the same query, and the five big platforms agree on the number one only 4% of the time (Kollective, July 2026). The useful metric is not a point-in-time position but consistency of appearance per platform over time.
Read the articleA quick guide to the 18 terms dominating the AI-and-tourism conversation in 2026: from fundamentals (LLM, RAG, hallucination) to assistant visibility (AEO, GEO, AXO, llms.txt) and agentic booking (agent, MCP, zero-click booking). Each term explained in plain language, with why it matters to a travel business.
Read the articleA travel business's visibility in AI assistants works in three layers: the model's memory (what it absorbed during training), live web search, and dynamic sources connected in real time. Each layer has different rules and degrees of control, and confusing them leads to investing in the wrong place.
Read the articleAI 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.
Read the articleWhen ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity recommend a hotel, more than half of their citations come from OTAs (55.3%) and only 13.6% from official hotel websites, according to a Cloudbeds study based on 810 queries. Recent reputation and third-party presence weigh more than your own website.
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