Last month, at the CarTrawler Connect25 conference, leaders in the airline, car rental, and mobility industries gathered to discuss the current challenges and opportunities across the travel sector. One of the most pressing themes explored at the event—and one that we forecast will define the industry in the short term—was the idea that the next wave of travel loyalty will not be about points, rewards, or discounts. It will be about delivering what people truly value: time and certainty.
This doesn’t just apply to car rentals. Our internal data shows that travelers prioritize fast, reliable bookings; short and convenient booking windows; and assurance that the right car will be available when it’s needed. More broadly, there’s a growing desire for easier, more connected travel experiences.
The industry-wide data paints a clearer picture. Consumers spend around two months researching their next adventure, scrolling through blogs, watching videos, reading reviews, and weighing options before finally booking. That’s an enormous amount of friction that AI can remove—or at least mitigate. As ChatGPT Operator partners with major travel platforms like Booking.com, Priceline, and Tripadvisor to offer autonomous booking capabilities, traditional travel brands face a critical crossroads: adapt or risk losing ground to faster, better technologically equipped competitors.
Beyond Chatbots: The Rise of Agentic AI
The conversation around AI in travel has moved past simple chatbots answering customer service queries. What the industry is witnessing with tools like Operator represents a fundamental shift from passive AI responses toward proactive, task-executing agents capable of browsing websites, comparing options, and completing bookings independently. This isn’t just automation—it’s agentic AI that understands context, preferences, and behavior patterns to make decisions on behalf of users.
Consider the potential: an AI agent that knows a traveler’s calendar, understands their budget, and tracks their content consumption habits. It could create experiences so personal that it would be like having a travel assistant who’s been shadowing their life for a decade. This vision represents the future of travel technology—one where AI travel agents don’t just respond to queries but proactively suggest, plan, and execute travel arrangements based on deep personalization and predictive intelligence.
What does that mean for traditional intermediaries that rely on travelers manually browsing, comparing, and booking? When an AI agent can accomplish in minutes what takes travelers weeks to research and decide, the value of the intermediary is called into question, and the entire foundation of how travel commerce operates could permanently shift.
Time and Certainty: The New Currency of Travel Loyalty
This dynamic applies to travel loyalty as well. Traditional points and status programs still matter, but today’s travelers are overwhelmed by information as choices continue to multiply. Should a loyalty member use points or cash to get the most value? What impact will that have on their gold-tier membership? Does their program have all of the booking options they’re looking for, like car rentals or destination-specific experiences? This convoluted decision-making process represents a pain point that AI-powered travel agents are uniquely positioned to address.
The loyalty programs that will appeal to tomorrow’s travelers are those that recognize time as the ultimate luxury. Instead of rewarding customers simply with points, they will reward them with efficiency—instant, personalized recommendations that eliminate hours of research and comparison shopping. Certainty becomes equally valuable: the confidence that a loyalty-integrated AI agent will understand their preferences so well that its suggestions align perfectly with needs, budget, and schedule. With the wealth of consumer data generated by (and available to) loyalty programs, it’s easy to imagine a loyalty-integrated AI travel assistant that anticipates the need for family accommodations, or understands a member’s preference for certain luxury brands, and guides travel experiences in those directions.
In this near-future vision, loyalty will be earned through demonstrated understanding and delivery of personalized experiences. Brands that can offer time savings, genuine personalization, relevant options, and booking certainty through intelligent AI integration will build deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers than any points program ever could. This, in turn, will create a virtuous cycle that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Tech Platforms Angle for AI-Powered Travel
As agentic AI reshapes the travel booking and planning landscape, major technology platforms are moving quickly to preserve their role at the center of the customer journey. Google, which is a key entry point for discovery and decision-making, has accelerated its AI initiatives to meet evolving traveler expectations and protect its travel-associated ad revenue.
At Google I/O 2025, the company introduced its new “AI Mode” for Search, and while this new capability isn’t explicitly aimed at travel queries, it seems poised to bring AI-aided travel planning to a Google-sized audience. Google’s arsenal includes comprehensive mapping data, search behavior patterns, location history, and integration across its ecosystem of services. This gives the company’s agentic AI Mode unprecedented context about user preferences and behavior.
For travel brands, this development presents both a challenge and an opportunity. As AI-powered tools increasingly guide customer journeys, traditional search and booking behaviors may evolve rapidly. To remain competitive and sustain direct relationships with travelers, brands will need to embrace AI-driven innovation—either by developing their own capabilities or by partnering with technology providers who can deliver intelligent, integrated solutions. Working with the right partners can accelerate time-to-market, ensure access to best-in-class personalization, and help brands remain relevant across the entire traveler journey.
The Obsolescence Risk for Traditional Players
The increasing prevalence of AI agents will force traditional booking platforms to adapt. If travelers can achieve the same comparison shopping and booking functionality through a conversational AI interface, what role do OTAs serve?
The answer lies in data quality, exclusive inventory, and integration sophistication. Those that move quickly can maintain relevance by leveraging these advantages to build customer trust. The largest OTAs recognize this, and are significantly increasing their marketing spend (to the tune of $4.5 billion in Q1 2025) in response.
Travel brands need to invest in AI to continue owning the customer relationship, instead of becoming commoditized providers whose services are accessed through third-party agents. This shift mirrors what happened to traditional travel agencies when online booking platforms emerged—except this time, the disruption cycle is moving faster. In an environment where OTAs are competing with AI agents solely on cost (rather than experience or relationship), they lose.
The Personalization Imperative
Personalization holds the key to creating positive experiences and building fruitful relationships. CarTrawler’s 2024 report, Driving Loyalty: Market Insights on Car Rentals and Reward Programs, found that personalization is essential for building trust and satisfaction among loyalty program members. True personalization in both loyalty and travel technology requires more than demographic segmentation or purchase history analysis. Today, it requires AI that knows calendars, understands budgets, and tracks content consumption habits to create predictive experiences that feel almost prescient.
Modern travelers leave digital breadcrumbs across multiple platforms—social media posts about desired destinations, calendar patterns that reveal optimal travel windows, spending behaviors that indicate budget constraints, and content consumption that signals interests and preferences. Agentic AI systems that can synthesize this information create personalization so sophisticated that it anticipates needs before they’re consciously recognized.
