Agentic AI in Travel & Hospitality Tech: What It Means for Founders & Investors

While adoption of generative AI tools has accelerated in the travel and hospitality vertical, agentic AI tools that assess, decide, and act on behalf of travelers suggests a technological transformation that could change the very fiber of how all organizations, not just those in Travel & Hospitality (T&H), are structured and how work gets done. Other verticals have already embedded agentic AI to much buyer and investor fanfare.

Agentic AI is uniquely suited to T&H’s tendency of having to contend with fragmented tech stacks across travel options, accommodations, and activities. It has the potential to upend the traditional structure of the industry and is prompting investors to rethink how they assess opportunity and risk.

Widespread adoption and evolving traveler behavior

One third of U.S. travelers now use generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT to plan and book trips according to Adobe, and gen-AI traffic to US travel sites has grown 3,500% year-over-year. In emerging markets like India and China, 90% of travelers are open to using AI in travel planning, according to SiteMinder’s Changing Traveller Report 2025. Kantar’s Connecting with the Tourism Community report claims the most appealing features are the ability to create personalized itineraries, receive localized and logistical recommendations, and find the best deals.

The Business Research Company conducted an AI in Hospitality and Tourism Global Market Report that expected the market to grow from US $15.7 billion in 2024 to more than US $20 billion in 2025, expanding over 30 percent annually. MakeMyTrip’s partnership with Google Cloud demonstrates what this looks like in practice: intuitive destination discovery, personalized itineraries, and multimodal recommendations with voice support.

The McKinsey & Skift 2025 report, "Remapping Travel with Agentic AI," confirms that adoption is accelerating across the industry: only 4% of large travel companies mentioned AI in 2022 annual reports, compared with 35% by 2024. Venture investment has followed suit: AI-enabled travel startups captured 45% of all sector funding in the first half of 2025.

For travel tech founders, the implication should be that it’s no longer enough to support AI features in bits and pieces. Travelers and investors expect AI to drive the customer journey, from discovery to booking to post-trip engagement. Whether this implication is a threat or an advantage will depend on how a business is structured.

How agentic AI differs from generative AI

Before we get into the M&A implications, let’s make sure we understand how agentic AI represents a significant evolution beyond generative AI. Where gen AI serves as an adviser, reactively offering suggestions or information when prompted, agentic AI takes initiative. It can make multi-step decisions, call on external tools and APIs, and complete complex actions. It can store and access memories like user preferences, draw on both structured data (like flight schedules or booking records) and unstructured data (like customer reviews and chat transcripts), and reason across this information.

For example, agentic AI could provide the sort of high-touch engagement a traveler might need if their flight gets cancelled, but they want to use their loyalty points to re-book a new flight in the morning and ensure that it’s an aisle seat, plus reserve a hotel room for the night with the preferred two queen beds.

As the McKinsey & Skift report explains, agentic capability is especially transformative in travel, where fragmented systems often force humans to act as "middleware," shuttling information between disconnected platforms. Agentic AI can bridge those gaps, clicking through legacy systems, retrieving and updating data across silos, and combining automation with true personalization. According to Sygnifiq’s 2025 AI, NDC, and Future Tech Trends, the idea of the connected trip, a friction-free experience that spans research, booking, and in-trip adjustments, can be fulfilled by AI with agency, capable of carrying out full workflows in adaptable and flexible ways.

Where agentic AI could add value

McKinsey’s analysis offers some tangible examples of where agentic systems could unlock ROI:

• Hotels: Automating room assignments based on guest preferences and loyalty status, predicting maintenance needs via sensor data, and dynamically scheduling housekeeping.
• Airlines: Personalizing bundles, handling overbooking, and adjusting pricing in real time according to demand and external variables such as weather.
• Frontline operations: Streamlining refund processing, re-booking, and voucher issuance so staff can focus on human-to-human service.

Then there are businesses where agentic AI could threaten their very existence. Traditional travel agents are the first to come to mind, but perhaps online travel agencies might also be under fire, depending on whether they can adapt to becoming a different kind of agent, directing other AI agents, or if they lost customers from their ecosystem as AI agents bypass them and utilize the same data sources.

According to Customer Experience Dive, Expedia’s Group AI integrations so far show a swiftness to capitalize on AI, an openness to integrating AI through the entire customer experience, and increased engagement and efficiency.

A founder dilemma: build or exit?

Some founders are racing to raise capital to scale their AI integrations; while others might see disruption on the horizon and consider earlier exits. Most are not building foundation models from scratch but licensing large language models such as OpenAI, Gemini, or Anthropic and tailoring them through APIs.

McKinsey warns that realizing agentic AI’s full potential requires strong data governance, talent investment, and cross-functional leadership. Without that foundation, organizations risk "AI fatigue," an unfocused rush to implement without measurable outcomes, or stagnating in pilot mode without the ability to provide agentic AI with widespread access to clean data over scalable cloud infrastructure. As far as agentic AI proof points, travel-tech investors will likely be looking for customer adoption and retention rates as well as revenue.

Skift counted 40 travel-tech M&A deals in the second quarter, underscoring that the market has been active as analysts had predicted. If travel tech companies have the foresight to examine their current technological baseline and experiment with more conventional AI to streamline internal marketing, sales, customer service, and software engineering processes, then they may be more prepared to integrate agentic AI. Which, in turn, could step up their valuations.

Conclusion

The promise of agentic AI is in reimagining the "how" of travel. It could help reduce logistical friction, deliver personalization at scale, and free employees to deliver meaningful service or even richer, more authentic experiences. But, realizing its value requires strategic readiness: strong data foundations, sound road maps, leadership commitment, and upskilled employees.

For travel-tech founders, this transformation could bring both potential opportunity and urgency. Those who integrate agentic capabilities that feel organic to their organization and can demonstrate adoption and ROI could command investor attention and stronger valuations. Those who lag behind or have business models that could simply be eliminated by agentic AI may face pressure to partner, merge, or exit sooner.

Vista Point Advisors helps founders navigate that inflection point: assessing readiness, benchmarking valuation, and planning strategic options for growth or sale. Find more information about what metrics you need to track and how to calculate them to run and sell your travel tech business. Or reach out to our bankers to discuss your current positioning and options.

This material and the opinions voiced are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or entity. All opinions and views constitute our judgments as of the date of writing and are subject to change at any time without notice. The material may contain "forward-looking" information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections, forecasts, estimates of market returns and proposed or expected portfolio composition.

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