For decades, travel companies have designed customer experiences for people.
Airline websites help travelers compare flights; hotel apps make it easier to book rooms and manage stays; and IVRs, chatbots, and contact centers help customers change reservations, ask questions, and resolve problems.
But a new participant is entering that experience: the customer’s personal AI agent.
Customers are starting to use AI to research options, make reservations, negotiate rates, and take other actions for them. It’s a shift poised to reshape travel CX in the year ahead – and one of the key trends outlined in TTEC’s CX Trends 2027 report, “Beyond AI: Building what comes next.”
As travelers delegate more of the journey to AI, travel brands need to rethink what it means to deliver a great customer experience. In an industry where comparison shopping, booking, and high-effort service journeys are fundamental to the experience, the shift deserves attention now.
AI is becoming a new front door to travel
Travelers have long turned to search engines, online travel agencies, review sites, airline websites, and hotel platforms to plan trips. Now, AI tools are becoming another interface travelers can use to research their options and make decisions.
Instead of manually comparing flight schedules or hotel options, a traveler can delegate some of that work to an AI agent. And the delegation is happening in degrees. Some travelers are comfortable letting AI research a vacation but still want to make the final purchase themselves. Others may permit an agent to complete a reservation or another defined task.
Our 2027 CX trends report underscores how significant the shift could become. Recent research shows most customers are open to collaborating with AI for activities such as researching options, 74% would let AI complete certain tasks such as negotiating a renewal or making a reservation, and 71% expect generative AI to influence their purchase decisions.
For travel CX leaders, this poses an important question: If an AI agent is looking for a flight, hotel, or travel experience on a customer’s behalf, is your brand ready to serve it?
If personal agents become an increasingly important route to discovery and purchase, being accessible to those agents could influence whether a travel brand even makes it into a customer’s consideration.
Customer journeys now need two paths
Imagine a traveler whose flight is canceled: rather than repeatedly searching for alternatives or waiting for assistance, the traveler could delegate that task to a personal agent. Or consider a hotel guest who wants to adjust a reservation: the interaction may begin with the customer’s AI rather than with the customer directly.
Today’s IVRs, chat flows, and service processes were designed around the idea that there is a human on the other end. But personal agents challenge that model. Businesses need a way to recognize an AI agent, connect it to the customer it represents, determine what the customer has authorized it to do, and decide whether the requested action should be completed, escalated for additional verification, or declined.
This creates a second experience travel brands must design intentionally: the agent experience.
The challenge is connecting that experience seamlessly to the human one. A traveler shouldn’t encounter unnecessary friction simply because an AI agent handled an earlier stage of the journey. At the same time, brands need appropriate controls over what agents can access and do.
And this isn’t a challenge travel companies can solve once and forget. The protocols intended to enable interactions with personal agents are still developing, making flexibility as important as readiness.
Personal agents’ effect on customer effort
Another important difference between humans and agents? AI doesn’t get tired.
A person may give up after spending too long on hold, encountering a confusing workflow, or failing repeatedly to get something done. But a personal agent can keep pursuing the customer’s objective across voice, chat, email, and digital channels. This could create new pressure on service capacity, operating costs, and revenue while introducing new questions about identity, permission, and trust.
For travel brands, that makes existing friction more than a customer experience issue. It could become an operational one.
The answer shouldn’t simply be to block AI agents. But brands should be asking themselves, What do we want AI acting for a traveler to be able to do?
And remember: certain interactions will still require a human touch. When it comes to issues such as flight problems or cancellations, or refunds, many travelers won't trust AI to handle it and will want to speak with an associate.
Build your personal-agent strategy before you need it
Travel CX leaders don’t need to predict exactly how personal agents will evolve, but they do need to prepare for delegated customer experiences. Here are a few places to start:
- Identify the journeys most likely to be handed to AI based on customer effort, friction, and potential value. Then establish clear boundaries around what personal agents can do, which actions require additional verification or human involvement, and which shouldn’t be permitted.
- Make sure to have clear ownership. Personal agents aren’t solely a technology problem. CX, operations, risk, policy, and technology decisions will increasingly intersect, so somebody must be accountable for bringing those pieces together
- Map the human and agentic journeys together, including authentication, escalation, resolution, monitoring, and measurement. Examine whether today’s CX technology can support the experience the company intends to deliver.
Prepare for the agentic traveler
Travel has always rewarded brands that remove uncertainty and effort from the journey. Personal AI agents could take that expectation to another level.
To explore this and the other trends poised to reshape customer experience in the year ahead, download TTEC’s full CX Trends 2027 report, “Beyond AI: Building what comes next.”
