Fwd: AI bubble or not

Hi there,

Travel-tech conference season is in full swing. 

Some of us just got back from Skift Forum, and next on the itinerary is the FutureTravel Summit in Barcelona on Oct 30, where our very own Director of Strategic Innovation, Tino, will take the stage with a TNMT-powered opening keynote.

Want to join us? 

We’ve got five free tickets up for grabs. 

Just hit reply with the subject line “let’s meet in Barcelona ✈️ (drinks on me)” and the fastest fingers win.

By the way: if you’ve glanced at conference agendas lately, you’ll know the drill: it’s AI, AI, and more AI. 

This made us pause and zoom out for today’s newsletter. 

Instead of another “AI will change everything” panel, we asked: 

What does the AI wave really look like in travel when you zoom out?

Enjoy.

Your Lufthansa Innovation Hub Team

Undoubtedly, AI is everywhere. 

Some technology experts are already warning of a bubble, drawing parallels to the dot-com boom, when internet hype (despite its transformative power) fueled overspeculation of the early 2000s.

Case in point:

• Skift Forum in NYC this week could just as well have been branded the “AI Travel Summit.
• The conversations bounced between sweeping claims about how AI will transform everything and concrete case studies (more often product features) that show the technology is already making a measurable impact today.

But here’s the question we keep asking ourselves: 

In the near term, which part of the travel industry will feel AI’s impact first: behind the scenes in operations, or on the customer-facing side?

Rather than add another hot take to the pile, we stepped back and ran the numbers.

This is part of a broader research effort we’ve kicked off (still in progress), aimed at mapping where AI adoption is already happening, and where the biggest near-term shifts are likely to hit.

To cut through the noise of today’s AI headlines, we wanted to quantify the broader AI-in-travel hype over time.

So we tracked global mainstream news coverage of “AI in travel”.

The result: monthly article volume has grown sevenfold in just three years, with no slowdown in sight.

And it’s not just our data pointing in this direction.

New research by Skift and McKinsey confirms the surge in AI momentum across travel:

• In 2022, only 4% of the leading 200 publicly traded travel companies mentioned AI in their annual reports. By 2024, that number had risen to 35%.
• In 2023, just 10% of travel-related VC funding went to startups with AI-enabled offerings. By the first half of 2025, that share had climbed to 45%.

Together, all these numbers underline the same point: AI has been prioritized on the mainstream boardroom (and investor) agenda.

Back to our news analysis.

Looking at the aggregate alone doesn’t tell the full story. 

When we split news coverage into customer-facing booking vs. operations-focused articles, a more nuanced picture emerges.

• Turns out, consumer-facing AI stories have clearly outpaced the rest, growing more than 10x in three years.
• In comparison, operations stories “only” grew around 8x over the same period.

Now, some context is needed here. 

• Mainstream media will naturally gravitate toward shiny B2C stories like chatbots, trip planning, and booking hacks, because they’re more relatable to the average reader than back-end ops improvements. 
• Also, the heavy lifting on the operations side often happens behind the curtains, with far fewer insights making it into the public domain (see our own deep dive into three airlines’ AI strategies here).

Still, the takeaway is clear: when it comes to public visibility, AI in travel is currently a B2C front-end story.

If we follow the trail into the customer-facing side of AI, the next question is: which themes are actually getting the most attention?

• To find out, we put AI to work on itself, leveraging natural language processing tools to decode the noise.
• By analyzing global news coverage, we identified the key themes most frequently discussed in the B2C AI travel context.

But we didn’t just want another buzzword list. 

The aim was to quantify their relative weight, so that we could see which topics dominate the conversation and which ones are still playing catch-up.

Here’s what that looks like in numbers:

As you can see, it’s no surprise that AI Travel Chatbots dominate the narrative, capturing more than half of all AI-in-travel news coverage.

That’s not surprising:

• Conversational interfaces for trip planning and search sit at the top of the list because, ultimately, that’s the very nature (and differentiator) of GenAI: the ability to explore information in human-like conversations.
• Unsurprisingly, nearly every OTA and airline.com site now features some form of GenAI-powered chatbot (and if you haven’t yet, revisit our airline chatbot analysis for deeper insights).

But the categories following chatbots are where things get really interesting.

Let’s run through each theme one by one:

The second most-discussed theme over the past three years shifts from the primary AIinterface (chatbots) to one of its most promising impacts: personalization.

• « Personalization” has been a buzzword in travel for more than a decade (ever since the launch of NDC), but it has mostly remained lip service. 
• With AI, we’re finally inching closer to true personalization, moving from generic offers toward individualized experiences (even if it’s still more aspiration than reality).
• A recent example comes from Booking.com, which teamed up with OpenAI to bring personalization into the early stages of trip planning. Traditionally, Booking.com excelled at converting specific searches (“hotel inRome for three nights”) into bookings but struggled to support travelers who weren’t yet sure where to go. 
• By combining its vast data with OpenAI’s language models, Booking is now running a conversational AI trip planner that helps users explore ideas, destinations, and itineraries in a more exploratory way.

Closely tied to personalization, theme #3 points toward the next era of revenue management: individualized pricing.

• Instead of today’s segmented yield management, AI could enable fares tailored to each traveler, based on their preferences, booking behavior, and even real-time context. 
• Agentic AI makes this vision even more compelling, as autonomous systems could constantly optimize prices on the fly.
• It’s still far from reality, but the amount of industry attention signals just how disruptive this shift could be. 
• A glimpse of what’s coming: Delta’s recent announcementof AI-powered personalized pricing marks an early step in this direction.

Unlike the previous themes, this one is already mainstream.

• Think reviews that are automatically generated or summarized by AI. 
• What started on platforms like Amazon has quickly spread into travel, shaping how travelers evaluate hotels, restaurants, or attractions.
• For context, Tripadvisor began rolling out AI-generated review summaries in 2023, giving users quick snapshots of guest sentiment without having to scroll through hundreds of comments.

This is the most technical theme on our list, but also one of the most promising.

• MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic that lets large language models (LLMs) “call out” to external systems. 
• Think of it as a universal interface that allows AI models to plug into live data, tools, and services, thereby extending their capabilities far beyond what’s in their training data.
• In travel terms: MCP is what could allow an AI assistant like ChatGPT to not just recommend a flight, but actually check availability in real time and book it (by directly communicating with an OTA’s inventory).
• A concrete example comes from TourRadar, which recently launched AI Discovery, a suite of MCP-powered integrations. With access to over 50,000 tours from 2,500 operators, TourRadar is bridging the rise of AI travel assistants with social commerce.

Avatars are fairly self-explanatory: AI-powered digital “faces” designed to interact with travelers in more human-like ways. 

Still a niche topic today, but with clear visionary implications.

• Early experiments, like Germany’s AI travel influencer Emma, were clumsy at best, more gimmick than game-changer. 
• But the potential is bigger: immersive, avatar-based assistants that could guide travelers before and during trips, blending personality with utility.
• For now, avatars are more hype than substance. But as the tech matures, they could become one of the most visible (and possibly most controversial) faces of AI in travel.

Theme #7 is definitely the talk of the town right now. 

• Although still small in overall share (given our three-year analysis window), it’s likely to have massive implications (and will likely dominate the public debate in the months to come).
• Unlike GenAI, which (primarily) produces content, Agentic AI actually takes action. It doesn’t just suggest options; it executes bookings or operational changes on your behalf. This is the foundation of the much-hyped “zero-click booking” future.
• A concrete example comes from Lufthansa Industry Solutions and CVG Airport, which are already testing agentic AI to reassign gates during disruptions, reroute baggage, or help passengers navigate terminals in real time.

Last but not least: Voice. 

• For years, assistants like Alexa and Siri promised frictionless everyday help but consistently fell short (especially in travel). “Sorry, I can’t help with that” became the default response, and planning or booking a trip was entirely out of scope.
• A concrete step in a brighter future: Amazon’s launch of Alexa+, its new GenAI-powered assistant. With integrations from major brands like Tripadvisor and Uber, Alexa+ can now provide travel inspiration, surface recommendations, and even handle tasks like checking ride options and booking directly via voice.

A simple ranking of themes, like the one above, is helpful to capture the scale at which different GenAI-related topics have been discussed in public over the past three years. 

But sheer coverage doesn’t necessarily equal relevance. 

And that’s the real point: today’s AI-in-travel conversation is shaped more by what’s visible than by what’s impactful.

To go deeper, we’re now mapping AI adoption across the entire traveler journey: where it touches the customer, where it reshapes operations, and where it could truly redefine the business of travel.

Stay tuned.