Travel Industry Leaders’ Predictions for 2025

Excerpt from PhocusWire

With 2024 officially closed, travel industry leaders are looking ahead.

2025 is sure to shape up as another exciting chapter in the travel history books building on plenty of newsworthy happenings, trends and people moves in 2024.

Experts from across the industry shared predictions around a myriad of topics including generative artificial intelligence, search, transparency, the funding climate and the future of branding.

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Mia Morriset, principal, Inovia Capital

• The integration of fintech solutions is set to revolutionize travel platforms – we’re already starting to see it with pioneers like Guesty, Hopper and Super, who are paving the way for broader adoption and industry-wide growth.
• While generative AI-first scaled platforms in travel have yet to emerge, AI-enabled companies are poised to unlock even greater rewards, transforming operations, enhancing customer experiences and driving profitability to much higher levels.
• Expect a resurgence in late-stage funding in 2025, fueled by secondary transactions and strategic consolidation plays reshaping the travel and tech landscape.

Greg Webb, CEO, Travelport

• As we embark on 2025, transparency will be central to the travel industry’s efforts to improve consumer trust. Travel suppliers are starting to realize that the only long-term, commercially sustainable business model in travel is to focus on customer lifetime value. In other words, they are prioritizing repeat customers who seek enhanced experiences over one-time buyers chasing the lowest fares. The use of bundled pricing can streamline decisions, but consumers must understand the components to assess value. Unfortunately, there’s been a rise in “consumer washing” that has eroded trust with companies doing things that they state are in the best interest of the consumer but are really aimed at driving more profit. Radical transparency is now essential as consumers require a simple way to comparison shop that allows for comprehensive decision making.

Mario Gavira, vice president of global growth and brand, Kiwi.com

• A number of converging trends will crystallize in 2025 casting a shadow on Google’s 20-year search dominance. On one side, AI is slowly but steadily changing how humans browse and find information. On the user side, short-form video is gradually transforming information consumption from text-based queries to engaging, contextually rich visual experiences, shifting the search behaviour to more relevant platforms like TikTok and Instagram. That said, Google’s wealth of user data, its widespread user ecosystem and leading AI capabilities to offer marketers the most relevant touchpoint to acquire a customer will remain unparalleled in the travel industry.
• The implementation of autonomous agentic AI systems that are able to complete real, multi-step process tasks with minimal human oversight will become a reality in 2025. These multi-agent systems will allow to increasingly automate all sorts of rule-based workflows in travel company backends. Conversely, consumer facing AI agents will struggle to replace the human search and booking experience.

Cara Whitehill, vice president, Thayer Investment Partners, founder, Unlock Advisors

• Two interrelated predictions that I’m quite optimistic about are a resurgence of exit activity in the travel sector and a corresponding unlock in funding for early-stage startups. With lower interest rates, a more favorable M&A climate that is likely with the incoming administration and a nice bench of mid- and later-stage companies that have been getting fit over the past couple years, we’ll see a perfect combination of supply and demand build throughout the year and drive a flurry of activity. These exits in turn will refresh the capital pool for investors (and startup employees) to recycle into other new and early-stage companies that have been starving for funding these past couple years.

Click here to read complete article at PhocusWire.