Last updated: August 2026
It’s Tuesday evening. The dishes are done, the laptop is closed, and someone is lying on the couch and scrolling through their phone with one thought running around in circles: We need a vacation. Not a specific one yet. Just a feeling. Somewhere warm, somewhere that won’t break the bank, somewhere that doesn’t take three evenings of searching to find.
So they open up the AI assistant and type something like: “Where is it warm in March for a couple’s holiday for under £800 each?”
No one at that moment is thinking about your brand. They don’t think about SEO, funnels or channels at all. They just want an answer that sounds honest. Whether they realize it or not, this is the precise moment your relationship with them begins, quietly, somewhere you may not have been watching.
A global survey of 22,000 travelers by Skyscanner found that more than half are now comfortable using AI to help plan or book a trip in 2026. That number is moving fast, and it has a problem: The more people trust these tools, the less patience they will have for anything that turns out to be wrong, outdated or overdone. Travelers don’t want to be sold to. They want to be told the truth quickly.
No one is looking for a straight line ride
There was a neat way to describe how people bought things: awareness, interest, desire, action, in that order. Travel planning has never worked like this before, and Google now has a name for the true pattern: the messy middle. People navigate apps, half-baked ideas, short videos, forum threads and reviews, circling the decision rather than moving towards it.
You’ll see a stranger’s beach story on TikTok, a friend’s Instagram story from a city vacation, and a Reddit thread arguing about whether a resort is overrated, all before anyone types a single brand name into the search bar. If your vision plan still assumes that Google is the only place where this happens, then you are only seeing a small portion of the actual journey.
What the real quest for a 2026 journey often looks like
Take away the marketing language and a typical path looks more or less like this:
AI assistant for inspiration (“Where is it warm in March”). Another AI tool to narrow down your search (“Compare 3-night city breaks for couples”). Google Maps for the unfiltered version, reviews, photos, and local tips. A quick Reddit search to settle a nagging worry (“Is Lisbon safe at night?”). Then, finally, a simple Google search for something very specific (“book a hotel in Lisbon center”), and for your website.
Notice how late your website appears on that list. Everything before it is where the decision is actually made.
The four moments are worth understanding
Dreaming out loud for artificial intelligence
This is where broad, ambitious questions live, and where AI assistants leverage travel articles, PR coverage, review platforms, and destination guides to build an answer. How Travelers Use AI to Plan a Trip addresses this right.
Verification of the story holds up
The moment the dream needs a reality check: is this really safe, does the photos match what people are saying, does the AI version match TripAdvisor’s version. Is this hotel really good? Covers what travelers really do here.
Allow the AI to make the call between two options
This is newer and stranger than most brands realize: people are now asking AI to choose for them between two operators or two hotels. Why AI recommends some travel brands and not others, explains what tips make that decision one way or another.
Money delivery
By the time someone gets to the booking form, the emotional labor has already been done. Making booking easy covers what can still go wrong here anyway.
Why this matters more than it seems it should
If the brand is invisible during the first three of those moments, the fourth will never happen. An amazing booking page can’t save a trip that wasn’t on anyone’s radar in the first place.
Travelers aren’t looking for the loudest sound in the room. They’re looking for the quietest, clearest path to an answer they can trust, and that path now passes through AI assistants and review sites long before it passes through your home page. Our AI team helps travel brands build exactly this kind of presence.
Download our travel and tourism AI research guide, covering everything in this series.
