Artificial intelligence (AI) has snaked its way into every corner of the travel industry—as well as most of the tech-reliant world—and marketing is no exception.

It’s already clear that search engine optimization (SEO) is changing, but how will generative AI affect marketing in the long term? How should travel brands navigate a changing environment?

According to experts, we’ll have to wait and see, especially as marketing evolves amid ongoing shifts, including the rise of agentic AI and Instagram’s integration with Google.

As part of Phocuswright’s five-part online The New Age(nts) Trend Series—which aligns with its Travel Innovation and Technology Trends 2025 report—a panel of industry experts discussed online visibility and traveler engagement with AI tools, including Google’s AI Overviews and AI modes that are already changing the search experience.

Mike Coletta, senior manager of research and innovation for Phocuswright, set the stage, asking the panel about a hot topic: search.

“The elephant in the room is search, because that’s where most people, historically, have started their trips,” he said.

Experts dove into what they believe is coming down the pike, particularly with AI Overviews suddenly taking over Google’s results page, in addition to other indicators of an AI-driven wave of change.

“I think the biggest thing that you can know is that it’s going to change even further—the one thing that is certain is change,” said John Lyotier, co-founder and CEO of TravelAI.

Brennen Bliss, CEO of Propellic, agreed.

“The best answer I can give you is nobody really knows right now what the purchase path will look like in a year,” Bliss said.

“I have an expectation that there will be a transition of the primary service people use to research and plan and book travel, which is right now the Google search experience. Whether that lands with Google, or whether that lands with another chatbot, is to be determined by the market.”

Looking ahead

The panelists also opened up about what they think marketing will look like further down the line and offered advice on how to prepare. 

Panelists agreed the best thing companies and employees can do is to be curious about what’s coming and to embrace it.

Michael Goldrich, president of HSMAI NYC and founder of Vivander Advisors, said the new job of marketers will be “an agent boss.”

“You’re going to have a lot of agents that can do the social, the writing and the newsletters, all this,” he said. “And the person’s job is ultimately going to be managing these series of agents. … You’re not going to be a revenue manager anymore, or a marketer, you’re going to be managing workflows.”

Goldrich said there will be a shift in how people work, and the success of this shift will depend on how well they understand this new technology. By learning and understanding, Goldrich said travel marketers can win.

“It’s continual learning,” he said. “It is understanding and just getting empowered.”

Bliss added that there will be a “very stark divide” between winning players and those who struggle in an AI-focused marketing space.

“Intellectual curiosity will win. Insatiability and the inability to be satisfied with the status quo will win,” he said. “There’s only so much that a company can do. I think that there is a responsibility to create awareness for a company to their team and employees. I do think that there is also personal ownership in this whole situation.”

The need for experimentation

Lyotier said that, as has held true historically with the rise of tools like Google, “experimentation is key.”

According to Lyotier, marketing is a combination of art and science, but it comes down to math, and measurable marketing will succeed.

“I don’t think that’s going to change,” Lyotier said. “If you look at the big picture and go back up many, many layers, travel as an industry is growing 8% year over year. If travel is growing 8% year over year, there are more consumers who are traveling. As travel becomes more efficient, there’s more dollars left to travel more efficiently. If you market travel more efficiently, more people will travel.” 

What marketers should do, Lyotier said, is find out what works best for them to stand out above the crowd. 

“Marketing is math. Find the channels that work for you, whatever it happens to be—paid, organic, new methods—constant experimentation is the key.”

The panelists also touched on personalization, AI advertisement creation, agent-to-agent communication and digital identity.

Watch the full discussion below:

A new AI-powered platform has been created for the “new generation” of luxury travel advisors, promising to transform how they source and use partner content to promote themselves.

Alan Ball, who has worked in corporate roles for Six Senses and Soneva, says ‘Pixi’, the new platform he has co-founded with Emma Squire, will completely redefine how visual content is discovered and accessed within the global travel trade – and without it, you risk being left behind.

While the new AI platform is only weeks old, Ball says it’s already being used by the likes of Six Senses, The Beaumont Mayfair, Trump Hotels Global and The Lindis Group New Zealand (among others) and more than 200 luxury agencies globally.

“Pixi is ground-breaking technology that enables hotels and suppliers to become discoverable, giving travel advisors immediate, on-brand access to the content they need to inspire, quote, convert and market.

“It’s a cloud-based platform that functions as a visual command centre for luxury travel brands and there’s nothing like this in the world.

“Images and video are so powerful… we all see it and wish we were there, and we wanted to create something for hoteliers to provide quality content for advisors to use.”

It means advisors can quickly find content to satisfy even the most discerning traveller who is on the fence about their booking, and promote their own area of expertise with content otherwise not available to them.

Co-founder Emma Squire adds, “We have the most aspirational and sexy content of any industry, but it mostly sits in every hotel’s cloud or under lock and key in a media gallery”. 

“It’s a totally outdated way of marketing your product. It’s like designing a haute couture dress just to leave it in a cupboard in your back room.

“Pixi is the catwalk of the industry, an opportunity for brands to tell their story, showcase their brand, and be discoverable by the global trade that sells them.”

Ball says they came up with the idea, which is free for advisors, after Squire was talking to a luxury travel agent who was finding it hard to get her hands on good visual content to promote what she could offer her clients.

“We started talking about a global hub, so if you’re looking for a camp in Africa or a hotel in Melbourne, you can find it all in one place to use in updating a newsletter, or updating a client, but the most powerful tool is using images and reels for social media,” Ball says.

He says with recent research showing 73 per cent of travellers say visuals influence where they book and 85 percent of Gen Z and Millennials booking trips based on video content, it’s even more important to get on board than ever – and, he says, it’ll be particularly useful for advisors who are independents.

“With the rise of independents, they’re working from home and don’t have a marketing team, so it’s spoon feeding them content to make it easy for them to promote themselves and the hotel partners they work with.

“We want this to be an industry standard tool, and now’s the time to do it because there’s a new generation of agents with a different mindset and hoteliers who understand the need to embrace technology.”

Pixi’s plans for the future are to include airlines, private jets, and tourism boards.

For more information and to sign up, visit PIXI.