Europe Is Where Travel AI Has to Prove It Can Work Across Borders

An AI assistant can recommend a hotel in Barcelona to a traveler in London in seconds. Completing that booking means dealing with availability, room types, payment and cancellation terms. Changing it later introduces another set of problems. Add a connecting flight, a corporate travel policy or a conversation that switches languages, and the distance between a convincing answer and a useful service becomes clearer. That distance is what interests me about travel AI in Europe. A product can look ready in one market and require substantial work in the next. The model may understand the language, but does the service understand the booking? Can it explain the conditions accurately, take the right action and get help when something goes wrong? These questions follow the conversations we started at Skift’s Data + AI Summit in New York in June. On Oct 6, 2026, we bring the Summit to London for the first time, with a program built around the companies facing them across Europe. Getting Found Is Only the Beginning The first question is who gets the customer’s attention. If more travelers ask an assistant to narrow their choices, travel businesses need to understand how they enter that consideration set—and what happens to the traffic they previously received. Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista and KAYAK CEO Peer Bueller approach this from businesses built around helping people compare travel options. Their challenge raises a larger question for the industry: how does comparison shopping change when the traveler delegates more of the comparison? For hotels, the same shift looks different. Being recommended is useful only if it leads to business on acceptable terms. Joe Pettigrew of L+R and Carlo Del Mistro of Stiplo bring the hotel visibility question into the program. What can a property influence? Which information needs improving? How do you distinguish a useful new source of bookings from another marketing expense whose results are difficult to measure? None of this stops at national borders. A hotel needs to be understood by customers searching from different countries, in different languages, with different expectations of what matters. One Group Does Not Mean One Operating Environment The next challenge sits inside the travel company. An airline or hotel group may have a shared AI ambition, but its brands, systems and teams do not necessarily start from the same place. That is why we have IAG’s chief AI scientist, Ben Dias, and Accor’s data science and AI leader, Nicolas Maynard, in the conversation. Where does a common approach help? What needs to remain specific to a brand or market? How much of the work involves the AI itself, and how much involves making information usable across the business? Strawberry’s Kari Anna Fiskvik and Amadeus’s Benjamin Cany bring another practical perspective: what it takes to get something live. OAG CEO Filip Filipov brings the data question. A service that helps someone make a travel decision needs information that is accurate enough, current enough and usable at the moment of that decision. American companies face these problems too, particularly when they operate internationally. Europe makes them difficult to postpone. Working across markets is central to the proposition. The Rules Become Part of the Product Europe also adds an explicit AI regulatory framework. The EU’s transparency requirements began applying in August, while major high-risk requirements follow later. The UK is pursuing a different approach through its existing regulators. For businesses serving customers across these markets, governance has to become part of deployment planning. The practical questions extend beyond whether a chatbot identifies itself. What customer information can a service use? What authority has the traveler given it? When should it hand a decision to a person? Sheena Varma of American Express Global Business Travel brings privacy, risk and compliance experience to a discussion that belongs alongside product and commercial decisions. There is an opportunity here for travel’s existing businesses. They know how bookings work, where the exceptions occur and what customers need when plans fall apart. That knowledge could become more valuable as AI takes on more of the journey—but companies have to make it usable. That is the conversation we want to advance in London, alongside investors and entrepreneurs examining what deserves funding. If your team is deciding how AI fits into its 2027 plans, these are the questions worth comparing with peers. Skift Data + AI Summit Europe takes place on Oct 6, 2026 in London.