The Travel Distribution Funnel Is Coming Apart

Photo Credit: The travel distribution funnel is broken. Grok One question kept coming up last week at our Skift Global Forum: Who owns the customer when AI agents become a normal part of travel? After conversations with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Sierra CEO Bret Taylor, Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel, Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin, and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, I came away thinking the question may be too…neat. For most of the online travel era, a traveler made intent visible by typing into a search box, Google often saw it before the travel company did, and airlines, hotels, and OTAs competed for the click and handled the booking downstream. The path really was never as clean as the diagram made it look, but seeing intent early was valuable, and travel companies spent billions to get in front of it. The promise since ChatGPT arrived was that this sequence could change: a traveler could tell an assistant what they wanted instead of repeatedly declaring the same intent across search engines and travel sites. The assum