Travelers and diners are no longer navigating journeys on their own. Increasingly, AI agents are doing it for them.
By 2026, hospitality, dining, and travel brands will operate in an environment where discovery, comparison, booking, and service are mediated by intelligent agents acting on behalf of guests. These agents will not just search, but they will evaluate options and apply preferences to find the best value and most appropriate offering. Ultimately agents will eventually even be able to complete bookings and orders to transact in real-time. That shift fundamentally changes how guests will come to discover and interact with hospitality and travel brands, and if those guests will even need – or want – to interact directly with a brand.
IDC’s FutureScape: Worldwide Hospitality, Dining, and Travel 2026 Predictions show that agentic AI is fundamentally changing the distribution “funnel.” This will reshape how brands compete, forcing a rethinking of data strategies, personalization, and even how brands are “found” in the first place.
From channels to agents: The new front door to travel and hospitality
Historically, hospitality and travel brands optimized for channels. Search engines, online travel agencies, loyalty apps, third-party delivery platforms, and physical locations defined how guests found and engaged with them.
Agentic AI changes that model.
IDC predicts that by 2030, 30% of travel bookings will be executed by AI agents, accelerating investment in LLM optimization and increasing direct bookings and profitability
In this environment, the first interaction may never involve a human browsing a website. Instead, an AI agent will query multiple sources, assess availability and pricing, weigh preferences, and complete the booking autonomously.
For hotels, airlines, and restaurants, this means one thing: if your data is incomplete, outdated, or fragmented, you effectively disappear from the agent’s decision set.
Agent-led search requires brands to rethink discoverability. It is no longer enough to rank well for keywords. Brands must ensure that large language models and agents can accurately understand what they offer, when it is available, and why it is relevant to a specific traveler or diner at any given moment.
Guest-centricity starts with a 360-degree data foundation
At the heart of this transformation is data. Not necessarily more data, but easier access to connected insights, so brands can quickly and easily analyze and take action to provide truly memorable and meaningful experiences.
IDC forecasts that by 2030, 50% of AI budgets in hospitality and travel will be allocated to personalization efforts, powering ambient intelligence and preference anticipation to increase guest satisfaction by 25%.
Achieving that level of personalization requires a unified, real-time view of the organization and the guest.
For hotels, this means connecting property management systems, loyalty programs, guest profiles, and on-property interactions into a single, actionable data fabric. For airlines, it means aligning inventory, pricing, operations, and customer history to anticipate needs from seat selection to disruption recovery. For restaurants, it means synchronizing menus, pricing, availability, and customer preferences across in-store, delivery, and digital channels.
Without this 360-degree view, agentic AI cannot deliver on its promise. Fragmented data leads to generic offers, broken experiences, and missed revenue opportunities. Unified data enables brands to move from reactive service to proactive engagement, recognizing guests and diners across every touchpoint.
Personalization becomes continuous, not campaign-based
In an agentic world, personalization is no longer a marketing tactic. It becomes an operating model and first-party data will be a secret sauce to ensure that brands don’t lose control of their guests to LLMs.
Agents will continuously interpret intent, context, and constraints. A traveler’s preferences, budget sensitivity, loyalty status, dietary needs, and timing constraints will all factor into decisions made in seconds. Brands that rely on static segments or periodic campaigns will struggle to keep up.
This is where ambient intelligence emerges. Personalization shifts from “what offer should we send?” to “how should the experience adapt right now?” Hotel rooms that can be adjusted to known preferences upon arrival. A restaurant that surfaces menu recommendations aligned to past behavior and real-time inventory. An airline that proactively rebooks a passenger before disruption becomes frustration.
These experiences depend on data that is current, trusted, and interoperable across systems.
Superapps, wallets, and the expansion of the digital guest journey
IDC also predicts that data modernization, security, and AI investments will increase by 65% as hospitality and travel organizations respond to demand for digital wallet–driven superapps, with 25% of major brands deploying one by 2030.
Superapps extend the customer relationship beyond booking into payments, identity, loyalty, and in-trip engagement. When combined with agentic AI, they become powerful orchestration layers. An agent can manage payments, redeem loyalty benefits, confirm availability, and coordinate experiences across partners, all on behalf of the guest.
But again, this only works if the underlying data is accurate and synchronized. Out-of-date room availability, inconsistent menu information, or disconnected loyalty data can yield undesired results. Hotels, restaurants, or travel options may not be surfaced by agents at all or if they are based on erroneous information can erode guest experience and undermine trust when guests don’t receive the specific service they were expecting.
What This Means for Hospitality Leaders in 2026
The shift to agentic AI is not incremental, and therefore should not be viewed as one-off projects, but rather as an infrastructure on which to build strategy.
Hospitality, dining, and travel brands must act now to:
- Modernize data architectures to support real-time, enterprise-wide visibility.
- Ensure offerings, availability, and pricing are machine-readable and continuously updated.
- Invest in personalization capabilities that operate across the full guest journey, not isolated moments.
- Rethink discoverability for an agent-led search environment, where accuracy and context determine inclusion.
Guest-centricity in 2026 will go beyond loyalty points and SEO. It will be defined by how well a brand leans into its first-party data to enable intelligent agents to represent their brand in a light that aligns with guests’ interests seamlessly, accurately, and at scale.
The brands that succeed will be those that treat data not as a back-office asset, but as the foundation of trust, personalization, and growth in an agent-driven economy.
