How AI and open platforms are transforming the travel experience from transactional to tailored
What does the perfect business trip look like? Maybe it includes an early hotel check-in, personalized restaurant recommendations, or curated ways to spend free time in a new city. With the integration of AI into managed travel programs, these possibilities are no longer aspirational—they’re becoming standard. Enabled by open architecture platforms, real-time data, and AI-driven decision-making, business travel is shifting from one-size-fits-all to uniquely personal.
Building a Smarter Traveler Profile
Many travel providers—airlines, hotels, car services—still operate on outdated infrastructure, limiting their ability to understand and serve the individual traveler. Data is often fragmented across closed systems, making it hard to build a complete picture of someone’s preferences and needs.
What if there was a way to circumvent this issue altogether? With the option to save a traveler’s preferences, the travel parameters set by their company, and the booking capabilities of their travel management company (TMC) into one profile, companies can tailor each business trip according to individual needs without compromise. New, AI-powered, open architecture systems make it possible to create a more transparent buying and selling experience, providing a personalized, unique “datagraph” with details on a traveler, their company, and their TMC.
This datagraph captures everything from small preferences – like wanting a hotel near a coffee shop – to bigger data points like professional trajectory and daily schedules. It leverages these key understandings to create a more streamlined and delightful traveler experience.
The Next Step: Creating Anticipatory and Reactive Hyper-Personalization with AI
A traveler profile is just the beginning of AI-powered personalization. Real customization doesn’t stop once the trip is booked. Through AI innovations, hyper-personalized travel can stretch beyond booking into the trip itself, and through post-trip processing, like expense reports.
Anticipatory personalization through AI has the power to take a traveler’s calendar and known preferences and create personalized suggestions to the itinerary before the need arises. Let’s say a traveler has an evening free during a business trip. Armed with the knowledge that they enjoyed attending the LA Philharmonic last month, AI can make a suggestion for a show that person might like after the work day is done.
This capability can also be leveraged on days where travel plans encounter disruptions – like flight delays or cancellations due to weather. An AI assistant can see the flight delay and cross reference the traveler’s calendar to get them on the next flight out, without interfering with scheduled meetings. If an earlier flight isn’t available, an AI assistant can suggest a quiet coffee shop or workspace nearby. Similarly, if a traveler wraps up meetings early and wants to get home sooner, AI can check for available flights, adjust the hotel booking, set up transportation for when the traveler arrives home, and even alert their family to the schedule change.
AI is now being integrated at every level of travel through open architectures that allow for data exchange – like calendars, bookings, and emails – between platforms. This long-awaited level of integration is having a significant impact on the industry, enabling true hyper-personalized travel that anticipates and reacts to each traveler’s unique needs.
Privacy in the Age of AI
Understandably, many are guarded when it comes to sharing their personal data especially when it comes to using an AI assistant that requires access to one’s private information to manage and schedule travel. With this innovation, it’s important to reshape perceptions of AI assistants and approach them with the same mindset of an executive assistant, a coworker, or a company’s travel manager. AI assistants and the companies that use them will become trusted partners in the travel planning process and will only have access to the information that users explicitly allow them to have.
The AI assistants that will succeed in this space will be those that prioritize data safety and privacy above all else and prove to their customers that the use of these tools is to augment the experience and not pose an unnecessary risk.
From Booking to Breakthrough: The Impact of Personalization
Hyper-personalized travel goes far beyond booking the right seat or finding a hotel within budget. It’s about predicting and resolving roadblocks in real time—before the traveler even notices them—and delivering a seamless experience every step of the way.
This new model not only elevates the traveler experience, but also benefits travel managers, finance teams, and businesses at large. It reduces manual friction, increases compliance, controls costs, and boosts productivity—while keeping employees happier and more engaged.
The future of business travel is one where each journey feels custom-built. And with the power of AI and open platforms, that future is already beginning to take shape.
