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.
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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.
Wilfred Fan, chief commercial officer, Klook
- Social media will continue to transform the way travelers not only discover but book their experiences. Social media platforms are evolving from being a source of inspiration to facilitating action, supported by the integration of seamless booking capabilities, allowing travelers to make bookings directly in-app. Additionally, authentic voices and creators will become even more essential partners for travel brands.
- This shift in behavior will further solidify the central role of experiences to trip planning, cementing a new booking flow where travelers first decide what they want to do and then choose how to get there and where to stay.
Patrick Andrae, co-founder and CEO, HomeToGo
- While AI already plays a valuable role in travel, the experience is still quite fragmented. AI can help you book a place or enhance the customer experience, but a seamless, end-to-end AI travel companion? That’s still rare. I believe starting next year we will see travel tech players step up with more holistic AI travel companion solutions.
- In 2025, we expect to see more companies developing tools tailored for travel agencies, as the fusion of technology and human touch experiences a revival as a preferred way to plan and book travel.
Adam Harris, CEO, Cloudbeds
- The real AI revolution in hospitality tech is happening behind the scenes. AI isn't about sexy chatbots or flashy interfaces; it's a ruthless efficiency machine transforming hospitality from the inside out. We're talking about systems that can predict staffing needs with scary accuracy, dynamically price rooms in milliseconds and automate 30-40% of tasks that used to consume human hours. This isn't incremental improvement — it's a complete operational overhaul that will separate adaptive businesses from obsolete ones; it's about being brutally, intelligently efficient.
- Hospitality tech is in a no-holds-barred battle for total ecosystem domination. We’ll see M&A surge, with scaled businesses acquiring complementary technologies to create the ultimate, operational platform for hoteliers. Only the most integrated, intelligent technology stacks will survive. The next 12-18 months aren't about buying market share — they're about building the definitive technological operating system that serves hospitality professionals.
Catherine Donaldson, director of marketing, Canary Technologies
- Generative AI, built for hospitality, will change the game for forward-thinking hoteliers. AI can provide automated responses that are personalized and specific to individual guests’ context. Hotels will thrive when they power guest engagement with hospitality specific AI models that can manage communication across channels. Omnichannel AI gives hotels the power to automate communications while improving the guest experience with fast, personalized responses.
- We predict more and more revenue managers will be focusing on how to increase TRevPAR (total), not just RevPAR, since ADRs and occupancy tailwinds slow. Increasing conversions on hotel websites, boosting upsells and other strategies will help drive revenue in 2025.
Richard Valtr, founder, Mews
- AI will bring about a difference in how we think about point solutions versus platforms and start driving tangible outcomes as a productivity tool rather than just a technology tool. We have seen small incremental changes to tech and adoption, and this is going to build in 2025. In the age of AI, the demands of users and guests will be greater, as they expect more detailed context, assistance and personalization. AI provides us with a huge opportunity to transform customer engagement.
- I think we will see some properties become dual-branded, where brands will end up working more like affiliate schemes. And this will drive a shift in loyalty. Since the pandemic, we have seen a significant growth in loyalty programs. But loyalty programs require substantial investment from hotels and as they grow and everyone becomes a member, no one gets to benefit. Credit card companies are becoming more influential in this space, with their digital points systems. Banks have much more information about guests and their behaviors than hotels do, which reduces the need for intermediaries, and I think we will see banks owning the customer relationships while hotels will be the asset owners, to provide more personalized offers, partnerships and bundled products, expanding hospitality far beyond accommodation.
Christian Watts, founder and CEO, Magpie
- In 2024 we saw the first AI agents launch. In 2025, they'll be arriving from all directions. The leading large language models will all have their own versions, and private companies will deploy in many verticals. As LLMs continue to improve, and start-ups learn from early customers, and from each other, the growth will accelerate and increasingly complex tasks will be automatable. As AI agents demonstrate capabilities, there will be discussion like never before about the position in the market for intermediaries. Conversations that would have been unimaginable two years ago will be commonplace. The most established companies in the industry, including Google and the largest OTAs will start to look very vulnerable.
Sarosh Waghmar, founder, co-chairman and chief product officer, Spotnana
- As the travel industry evolves, travel providers are increasingly taking control of their distribution channels by prioritizing personalization and direct distribution of their content through their own APIs. This shift will significantly impact travel sellers, who will need to invest in modernizing their technology stacks to meet changing customer expectations. The ripple effects of this trend will be felt throughout the entire ecosystem, challenging all stakeholders to adapt to a more dynamic content landscape.
Rajnish Kumar, group Co-CEO, Ixigo
- A noteworthy trend for 2025 is the increasing participation of first-time flyers from India’s Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. With growing household incomes and aspirations of the middle class, experiential travel is set to surge. These cities are not just contributing to domestic travel but are also emerging as significant contributors to international travel. India’s outbound travel spending, which reached $17 billion in FY24, is expected to grow further, underscoring the country’s expanding global travel footprint.
- Religious tourism is set to thrive further as increased government investment in infrastructure improves connectivity to remote destinations. Religious places such as Tirupati, Shirdi, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar, Ujjain and Amritsar were the top picks for travelers opting for bus journeys. Continued government focus on infrastructure investments and new corridor developments in key religious sites is expected to drive further growth in spiritual tourism in 2025.