With peak travel season coming up, travel brands will soon face a real-world test. Amperity’s 2025 State of AI in Travel Report shows that almost every airline and hotel plans to maintain or increase their AI spending this year. However, most are not ready to expand these efforts. This gap between goals and action will shape how travel companies build and improve their guest experiences and loyalty in the busy months ahead.

The data tells a clear story. Eighty percent of companies use AI in some capacity, but only about 12.5% feel prepared to deploy it on a larger scale. While many focus their investments on marketing and support, few use AI directly with guests. This is where the biggest opportunity lies.

The Frontline Readiness Gap

Travel is one of the most operationally demanding industries in the world. If systems fail or service falls short, travelers can feel it immediately, which is why being prepared and AI-ready across the organization is so important. This is especially true during busy times, when delays, disruptions, and spikes in demand are inevitable.

The report shows that only 35% of travel brands currently use AI in guest experiences. Check-ins, upgrades, service recovery, and on-the-ground personalization are still largely manual or siloed processes. Meanwhile, 58% of companies report that their customer data is fragmented or incomplete, making it difficult to personalize interactions, respond quickly, or anticipate customer needs.

These gaps have real consequences. When AI isn’t fully embedded in frontline experiences, travelers don’t feel the benefits, and the business doesn’t see the returns.

What’s holding travel back

Some brands are already embedding AI into their operational core, optimizing schedules, personalizing offers, and adapting to real-time demand. But for most, this level of integration remains the exception.

Three barriers stand out:

1. Limited training. More than a third of travel organizations provide no formal AI training for employees. Teams often have access to new tools but not the context or confidence to use them effectively.
2. Heavy IT dependency. Many marketing and customer-facing teams still rely on IT for even basic data management. Just 29% can manage customer data independently, while 14% rely entirely on IT.
3. Data fragmentation. Scattered data across loyalty systems, booking engines, and marketing platforms makes it harder—and more expensive—to build a unified understanding of the traveler.

These are not technology problems alone. They are leadership and alignment problems. Solving them requires a shift in focus from experimentation to enablement, from deploying new tools to empowering people to use them.

Where the opportunities lie

Most of today’s AI investment is concentrated in back-end functions like marketing automation, support workflows, and analytics. These are valuable ways to use AI, but they don’t touch the guests in meaningful ways or differentiate one travel brand from another. Loyalty is built within the traveler’s experience: how easy it is to check in, how quickly issues get resolved, and how personalized each interaction feels.

Shifting investment toward guest-facing applications can make a real difference in creating a lasting impression, keeping customers happy, and improving loyalty. AI can anticipate needs, personalize experiences as they happen, and solve problems before they escalate. It can turn one-time travelers into repeat guests.

This shift requires breaking down internal barriers. When teams have direct access to clean, connected customer data, they can move faster, be more creative, and grow more easily.

Integration and Alignment are Key

While some companies are either reluctant or slow to fully adopt AI because their technology is not ready, the bigger barrier is organizational alignment.

Travel brands operate across dozens of disconnected systems, including reservation platforms, loyalty databases, POS systems, mobile apps, websites, and customer service platforms. Integrating these systems is complex, but the technical hurdles are solvable. The harder part is ensuring marketing, operations, IT, and leadership work from the same source of truth.

The data shows that companies using a customer data platform (CDP) are five times more likely to achieve full AI adoption across business units and nearly twice as likely to use AI daily. Clean, unified customer data is the foundation that allows AI to operate effectively.

Building a foundation to scale AI

There’s no single breakthrough that will make AI successful in travel. The leaders emerging today are those building a solid foundation through four key priorities:

1. Unify data across the enterprise. Breaking down silos between departments and systems is the first step to scalable AI. A unified data foundation enables recognition of travelers across channels and powers real-time decision-making that improves both service and operations.
2. Build trust through quality and transparency. AI is only as effective as the data behind it. Ensuring that data is accurate, responsibly governed, and transparent fosters both internal confidence and external trust.
3. Invest in people as much as technology. Tools only create value when people know how to use them. Ongoing training—especially for frontline teams—helps employees interpret AI insights and act on them quickly and confidently.
4. Evolve toward context-aware AI. As systems mature, AI will increasingly operate in real time, understanding each traveler’s history, preferences, and journey stage. Advances in real-time identity resolution and event-driven architectures will allow brands to anticipate needs rather than simply react to them.Real-time identity resolution, event-driven systems, and advanced machine learning will allow hotels and airlines to anticipate needs instead of just reacting to them. This will redefine how guests experience travel, moving from transactional to truly personalized.

    

   From Pilot to Practice

   The next year will be crucial for the travel industry as AI moves beyond early experimentation toward a strategic business asset. The real opportunity and value come from using it where travelers feel it most. Brands that make AI a core part of their business, unify their data, train their teams, and invest in guest-facing areas will succeed.

   That’s how travel companies will turn AI from a talking point into a real advantage and build lasting loyalty.

Written by Tony Owens

CEO World Biz

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