Blog
We’re glad you’re here!
Breathe deeply, grab your preferred coffee mug, and look through our blog.
A Practical Roadmap for OTAs to Become AI-Native
Dante Bui
November 27, 2025
For the past two decades, Online Travel Agencies have lived through almost every structural shift the industry could throw at them—metasearch disruption, mobile migration, direct-booking wars, Google’s ascent, skyrocketing paid acquisition costs, and the gradual dominance of mobile-first travelers.
But 2025 marks a new inflection point. Not a marketing trend. Not a UI facelift. A fundamental rewiring of how OTAs operate.
AI is not arriving as a feature. It’s arriving as an operating system—one that decides how inventory is ranked, how users are understood, how support is delivered, how revenue is optimized, and soon… how trips almost plan themselves.
For OTAs, the message is clear: Adopt AI deeply and deliberately—or watch competitors rewrite the rules of travel retail.
This is a practical roadmap for OTAs already running a travel app, grounded in real business realities and the tectonic forces shaping the market.
Phase 1 — Clean Up the Foundation (0–3 Months)
“AI is useless without clean travel data.” All CTOs know this, but OTAs feel it more than anyone.
OTAs sit on top of messy, inconsistent, supplier-generated data. Room types are mislabeled. Amenities are inconsistent. Flight descriptors vary by GDS. Property metadata is poorly structured.
Add in user behavior data fragmented across mobile, web, CRM, and acquisition sources—and this is why many AI experiments collapse before they begin.
The first three months need to focus on:
- Centralizing data into a warehouse or CDP
- Fixing taxonomies for hotels, flights, and destinations
- Normalizing supplier content
- Rebuilding event-level tracking for the app
This isn’t glamorous, but it determines whether your personalization engine becomes magic… or fails silently.
Meanwhile, quick AI wins are possible—and should launch early.
Early wins for OTAs:
- AI customer support (understanding refunds, booking changes)
- AI-powered search autocomplete
- Suggested destinations based on past behavior
These deliver value without touching your core booking infrastructure.
Phase 2 — Build OTA-Level Intelligence (3–9 Months)
This is where AI starts influencing what OTAs care about most:
traffic efficiency, conversion improvement, and attachment rate.
1. Build a Personalization Engine That Feels Human
In OTA economics, personalization isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a conversion multiplier.
Moving from “customers who booked Bali also viewed Phuket” to deeper, behavior-driven models changes the equation.
Examples of true OTA personalization:
- Detect business-vs-leisure travel intent from search and time patterns
- Rank hotels based on predicted preference (budget, star rating, room size, facilities)
- Adjust flight recommendations by inferred flexibility or loyalty
- Localize the home screen to the traveler’s planning style
Expected impact: +2–8% conversion lift, depending on depth.
OTAs who master this get closer to Booking.com-level ranking sophistication.
2. AI-Powered Reranking: The Real Money Maker
All OTAs know the truth: Reranking is where billions are made or lost.
AI-driven reranking models use:
- embeddings for similarity
- contextual signals
- price-demand patterns
- user-specific preference predictions
These models can reorder:
- hotels
- room types
- flight options
- packages
- activities
…based on the unique mathematical signature of each user.
When done well, OTAs report:
- 10–30% higher attachment rate
- 5–12% increase in revenue per search
This is the closest thing to a “cheat code” OTAs have ever had.
3. Use Generative AI to Rewrite the Internet’s Worst Travel Content
OTAs still suffer from decades-old supplier descriptions. Inconsistent tone. Inaccurate details. Missing context.
GenAI solves this with:
- rewritten hotel descriptions
- structured, accurate amenity lists
- localized content for 10+ languages
- dynamic descriptions tailored to user type (families vs couples vs business travelers)
Suddenly, your catalog becomes premium—without manually editing 500,000 listings.
Plus, this dramatically improves SEO and in-destination relevance.
4. Automate Back-Office Chaos
Behind every OTA is a mountain of manual operations:
- refunds
- vouchers
- cancellations
- fare rules interpretation
- supplier dispute handling
- customer inquiry triage
AI classification and automation can remove 30–60% of manual workload.
And this matters because OTA profitability has always been limited not by demand, but by operational drag.
Phase 3 — Become Predictive, Not Reactive (9–18 Months)
This is where OTAs transition from “presenting options” to “anticipating needs.”
It’s the step that separates modern travel platforms from legacy marketplaces.
1. Predictive User Modeling
OTAs have more behavioral signals than airlines or hotels. You can predict:
- Likelihood to book
- Booking window
- Price sensitivity
- Cancellation risk
- Preferred star category
- Next likely destination
- Trip purpose
Predictive models unlock:
- smarter retargeting
- optimal timing for promo pushes
- reduced discount waste
- precision merchandising
And they reduce marketing dependency on Google—saving millions.
2. The AI Trip Companion Inside the App
Every OTA wants the same thing: users returning to their app during the trip (not just at booking).
AI makes this possible by creating:
- live itinerary updates
- flight-change monitoring
- gate alerts
- weather-based recommendations
- local food/activity suggestions
- rebooking assistance
- micro-moment nudges
This drives new revenue via activities, insurance upgrades, and dynamic in-destination offers.
The battle for the traveler’s home screen is shifting from “book with me” to
“travel with me.”
3. Build Your Travel Knowledge Graph
This is the hidden superpower of the top OTAs.
A travel knowledge graph links all your entities:
- destinations
- hotels
- activities
- user preferences
- reviews
- pricing patterns
- availability
- contextual signals
It powers:
- semantic search
- better personalization
- conversational booking
- agent-like AI assistants
This is how Google Travel became unavoidable. OTAs must build their own.
Phase 4 — The AI-Native OTA (18–36 Months)
At this stage, the OTA stops behaving like a marketplace and starts behaving like an intelligent travel OS.
1. Autonomous Customer Experience
Imagine:
- A flight delay triggers automatic hotel modifications
- AI negotiates refunds
- AI resolves 80% of customer tickets
- Reconfirmation happens without human intervention
- Rebooking is offered before the traveler even asks
This isn’t science fiction. It’s where the leaders are heading.
2. Autonomous Revenue Engines
The holy grail: a system that adjusts merchandising, pricing, and offers dynamically based on real-time demand.
Such a system can:
- predict high-value users
- optimize inventory
- generate promotions automatically
- run experiments autonomously
- balance commission vs conversion
- tune paid acquisition spend with AI bidding
This rewrites the economics of OTA profitability.
3. Governance, Regulation & Trust
AI-native OTAs must formalize:
- privacy frameworks
- fairness in ranking models
- transparent recommendation logic
- bias control
- compliance with EU AI Act
- secure data handling
In 2025–2030, trust will become the primary competitive differentiator—the new loyalty.
OTAs were the first digital disruptors of travel. But today, they are the ones facing disruption—from superapps, direct channels, and AI-native newcomers.
The OTAs that succeed in the next decade will not be the ones with the most inventory, or even the best prices. They will be the ones who:
- understand the traveler intimately
- predict intent with precision
- reduce friction in every step
- automate operations intelligently
- become a companion, not just a marketplace
AI is not the future of OTAs.
It is the new architecture they will be built on.
Having developed forward-thinking technology for travel companies, Vitex has a lot to share about how these trends can be anticipated and put into practice in most scalable ways. Our wide spectrum of expertise also helped global partners scaling their technology and user base. We can support you too! Please don’t hesitate to contact our colleagues Tony Bui , Lars van den Bos , Annie Nguyen to get the discussions going.
WRITE A COMMENT