Travel's New Social-to-Booking Feature is... Anti-Social
New AI-powered booking tools can build a full travel itinerary just from sharing a single social media post. But are companies missing an even bigger opportunity made possible by this new technology?
For the average traveler, a “personal AI travel agent” has a real ring to it.
And the entire hospitality and travel booking industry thinks so, too.
A slew of new AI travel booking platforms have hit the market in recent years — Gumo, Mindtrip, Klook, Layla, just to name a few — each claiming to take care of the tedious parts of trip planning, so you can focus on the fun stuff: picking activities, excursions, and even full-day itineraries, often sourced from user-submitted content.
Not to be outdone, the Expedias and Bookings of the world are rolling out their own AI tools — because if there’s one thing a $28 billion company hates, it’s a startup eating lunch on its lawn. Even the hotel chains are getting in on it, hoping their own branded chatbots might lure loyalty members — and their wallets — away from pesky third-party platforms.
In previous decades, startups could leverage tailored technology and product agility to finesse a foothold to climb from; a new feature, alone, might be enough to make headway in a crowded, competitive market. Today, however, AI’s lowering of barriers — both of entry and development — has opened a two-way street where both innovation by challengers and parity by incumbents is, seemingly, just a prompt away.
One of the newer AI features making waves is “social sharing” — the ability to build a full travel itinerary with booking options from a social media link shared by a consumer. For anyone with an Instagram or TikTok account, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize the potential of a tool that can bridge discovery (social media) to conversion (booking travel).
It didn’t take much for Expedia to recognize that potential — or, likely, much of their budget to do something about it. The feature, previously a differentiator for AI apps like Gumo, has already been adopted into Expedia’s AI trip planner, which added a similar capability to its AI-powered platform last year.
But there’s a telling detail in Expedia’s approach. According to Condé Nast Traveler,
Expedia “won’t be offering compensation” to creators if a user books a trip based on their Reel using the new tool. “Through Expedia Trip Matching, Expedia will use AI to provide travel recommendations based on public reels submitted by travelers on Instagram,” a spokesperson said.
In other words: Expedia sees the content as raw material. The person who made it? Irrelevant.
But is social media-based travel planning and booking enough of an idea for smaller companies to attract consumers, when Expedia essentially offers the same exact service? And if a customer did give a new booking platform a fair shot, what would make them stay there?
Here’s what platforms are missing: it was never really about the itinerary.
The real value of social-driven travel content isn’t what an AI can render from a Reel; it’s the trust baked into the recommendation itself. Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) has always been the most powerful force in travel (and hospitality). And the companies that figure out how to build around it, rather than just on top of it, are the ones with a real shot.
I’ve been chewing on some version of that question for over a decade, long before any of this technology existed.
In 2015, I was in the last semester of a master’s program at UCF’s Rosen School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. I’d arrived at the program having worked in boutique hotels for a few years, but with companies like Airbnb on the rise, my mind was firmly focused on emerging technology in hospitality and travel.
One of my last assignments as a graduate student required I prepare a list of career objectives and corresponding strategies. I hadn’t read my paper in nearly a decade before today, but one idea has lived at the top of my mind — and in frequent conversation — ever since:
“Objective: Develop my own travel booking company/app.
“Strategy: Consider joining a travel-tech company focused on app and web-based development… Create an app for international travel and adventure sector that utilizes social media sharing and WOMM for interactive, collaborative itinerary creation and booking.” At first glance, there isn’t much of a difference between what I imagined then and what Expedia is doing now — so, aside from a little bit of validation, why share it?
Back when I wrote my paper, social media commerce was just beginning. Instagram ads had only just rolled out, direct buying was still years away, and the vast majority of your feed came from the posts of people you actually knew.
So, in my paper, when I said “social media sharing,” I wasn’t some Nostradamus travel agent predicting the AI tools of today; I was referring to the inherent effect of when travel content was shared, via old school posting, between you and your personal network of friends.
The real value of the idea, as I imagined it, wasn’t in social media’s content or an itinerary that could be rendered from it; it was that the method of discovery was pure, uncut, unmitigated WOMM. To me, that’s where the real opportunity existed, and marketers seem to agree. Despite 64% of marketing executives believing that word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing, only 6% say they have mastered it — sort of a “white whale” marketing strategy, if you will.
Beyond what I’d learned in the classroom, the potential of introducing a travel booking platform based on social-driven WOMM dawned on me because of where I spent my time outside of it — I’d come up with the idea, and written my paper, while working at a concierge desk.
In my two years as the least knowledgeable concierge at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resorts, virtually everything I could offer a guest was already online, probably cheaper, and easily bookable from their phone. Disney guests lived up to their reputation: 99% of them already knew more about services and experiences than I did. But they still came to my desk — and they still booked. The difference between a free day at the pool and an expensive day at Magic Kingdom wasn’t my expertise or the mouse on my name tag. It was that in meeting me, they felt like they knew me, and someone they knew was telling them to pull the trigger.
As reductive and self-deprecating as that may seem, when it comes to any experience, the theory holds true. Whether it’s an old friend from college sharing videos of their vacation on social media, or a “hidden gem” recommendation from a random dude at an airport bar, when we assess experiences we allocate an irrational amount of value in the opinions and advice of people we’ve met, expert or not, no matter how well we know them. And when we actually know the person? Word of mouth is as good as it gets, with 92% of consumers believing recommendations from friends and family over every other form of advertising.
Planning a trip doesn’t feel like buying a product — it feels like an investment, or placing a bet on a memory. That isn’t a casual transaction; it’s an emotional decision, and most people need some form of validation before they put the money down. And the key to securing that investment, what unlocks the emotional dynamic between product and consumer, is what WOMM conveys, more than any other form of marketing: trust.
For a giant like Expedia, trust is primarily driven by the scope of their services and the equity of their brand. In which case, for their new AI tool, who made the content, and why a traveler trusted it enough to upload, doesn’t really matter to them.
They could, in theory, leverage their robust loyalty and points system to promote WOMM, drive engagement, and introduce a system that drives conversion. But as the Condé Nast Traveler piece makes clear, that’s not their focus.
As a concierge, while I was being paid to provide guest service, I was incentivized with commission to plan and book experiences for guests. And while the collective bookings between every concierge working at Walt Disney Resorts were a tiny fraction of their overall booking sales, even with Disney’s exceptional digital booking infrastructure, our value was in our rate of conversion and ability to land those who needed more than just spectacular Disney content to get them across the finish line. Without a concierge presence, many of those guests could opt for options beyond the “House of Mouse.”
If the smaller booking platforms banking on this specific technology are looking to pivot, there could be opportunity in the area Expedia has either disregarded or overlooked. From a consumer perspective, in focusing on a social-shared product that promotes WOMM by engaging with both the customer (the guest) and the creator (the concierge), not only could they attract more intentional traffic to their platforms, they could also increase conversion rates and build loyalty.
Yes — AI can be your personal travel agent who handles the hard part (i.e., the flight times, the hotel comparisons, the itinerary optimization). But it can never capture the impact of discovery from a creator you know, or the validation that occurs from a simple DM reply (“Dude, it was INCREDIBLE. You gotta go!”).
For now, that’s still a human thing. And if someone builds a platform that understands that — one where sharing content actually means something, where the person behind the recommendation matters as much as the recommendation itself — then we’re not just talking about a better booking tool...
We’re talking about adding millions of digital concierge desks to a whole new travel booking economy.
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