The AI Trust Gap: Why Travelers Will Continue To Choose Trusted Brands
68% of travelers still prefer to book with a trusted travel brand over AI platforms
Travelers don’t have a technology problem with AI. They have a trust problem.
AI is already transforming how people plan and discover travel, making research faster, recommendations more relevant, and inspiration easier to find. But when it’s time to actually book, curiosity with AI gives way to caution.
In our new study, The AI Trust Gap, we surveyed travelers across the US, UK and India to understand how AI is shaping planning, booking and in-trip behavior. The takeaway is clear: travelers aren’t interested in booking a trip through an AI chatbot, and what’s holding them back isn’t model quality or features. It’s trust.
Travelers trust AI to suggest, not decide
Travelers are increasingly comfortable using AI in a supporting role. As the research shows
But there is a firm line between discovery and buying: 66% of people said they wouldn’t trust AI to buy or book anything on their behalf.
A traveler might use AI to plan a week in Italy, surfacing destinations, comparing neighborhoods, or mapping out a day-by-day itinerary. But when it’s time to enter payment details, change flights or a hotel reservation mid-trip, they turn to a platform they trust.
Travel is a high-stakes industry, where a single mistake could cost thousands of dollars or worse, ruin a long-awaited family vacation. When something goes wrong, travelers don’t get that experience, time or money back.
Trust is the real barrier to AI booking
The hesitation travelers have with booking something through an AI chatbot or agent isn’t about whether it can make the booking. It’s about whether it can be trusted.
Travelers point to three main concerns about AI buying on their behalf:
Even as AI becomes more embedded in everyday life, travel booking behavior is still anchored in trust. For example:
This gap highlights an important shift: AI is becoming a powerful discovery tool, but it hasn’t replaced the need for trusted travel platforms.
The role of trust in the AI era
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AI hasn’t replaced the need for travel platforms because trust in travel goes beyond surfacing information. It’s about accuracy and accountability across the whole journey – from discovery and booking to support if something changes.
Travelers want to know:
AI chatbots and agents can generate answers. But in travel, accuracy and accountability are the ultimate currency.
This isn’t surprising to us. AI chatbots excel at low-stakes tasks like summarization, but it can't call a hotel at 2am to fix a booking error, rebook after a cancellation or advocate for a traveler if something goes wrong mid-trip, only a trusted travel brand can. That’s not a limitation of technology. It’s a limitation of not having dedicated supplier relationships and operational infrastructure behind it.
What does The AI Trust Gap mean for the industry
For the travel industry, this creates a challenge and an opportunity. Travelers are starting to plan their trips in new places: AI assistants, conversational search, social media. But they’re still only booking and managing their trips where trust is strongest. This fragmentation makes distribution more complex, but also more important across the full journey.
The opportunity lies in offering innovative AI-powered experiences at every stage of the traveler journey while being the trusted place they discover, book, manage and complete their trips.
What does the AI Trust Gap mean for partners
Trust in travel isn’t built through technology alone. It’s built through real world relationships and assets, strong customer support, and decades of deep industry knowledge. That kind of foundation takes time to build – and it’s where trusted travel brands and partners have a structural advantage.
How is Expedia Group helping partners navigate AI chatbots and agents?
By connecting supply to a broad and growing network of AI chatbots and agents, along with traditional channels, we help partners reach travelers wherever they start their journey while ensuring consistency, accuracy, and control over how their inventory appears.
That includes:
In other words, combining the reach of AI chatbots and agents with the reliability of our trusted marketplace.
Trust will define the next phase of AI in travel
Travel demand isn’t going anywhere. But how travelers plan and book is evolving quickly. AI will continue to reshape how travelers discover, book and experience trips. But in high-stakes categories like travel, trust will determine where transactions happen. The companies that win won’t just deliver smarter recommendations. They’ll deliver confidence at every step of the journey.
Methodology
The AI Trust Gap research, which was commissioned by Expedia Group and conducted by YouGov, surveyed more than 5,700 adults across the U.S., U.K., and India from March 10-25, 2026. The study explored attitudes toward AI across the full travel journey, including planning, booking, and in-trip support, as well as trust, concerns, and future expectations.
This tracks exactly with how I use AI for travel. I’ll spend an hour with an AI building a detailed itinerary for Seoul or Tokyo. The moment it’s time to actually book the flight or hotel, I’m on a trusted platform. The AI did the thinking; the platform takes the accountability. That’s actually a healthy division of labor — until someone figures out how to make the accountability layer work natively in AI.
Really hits home, Xavier. Having run brand and customer strategy for an airline in APAC, I know that '2 AM' feeling well. The trust gap isn't about the tech being broken; it’s about a lack of control. People are fine using AI for ideas, but they won't hand over the keys to their trip if they feel like they’re becoming a passenger in their own decision-making. We don't just need better models; we need to ensure the traveler stays a sovereign over their decisions. Trust isn't built on a better chatbot, it’s built on knowing you still own the final 'Yes' when it matters most.
The real boundary isn’t planning vs booking, it’s reversibility. people will let AI help when a bad suggestion is annoying, but the moment the mistake becomes expensive, time-sensitive, or hard to unwind, flight changes, payment issues, hotel recovery at 2am, they want a party that can actually absorb the failure. That’s less a model gap and more a service-recovery gap.
I’d argue trust in travel won’t be won by the assistant that plans best, but by the platform that makes delegation feel safe. Recommendations are easy, the harder layer is confidence that if AI books, modifies, or reroutes something, there’s accountability behind the action and a human path when the trip goes sideways. That’s where the real moat starts to look more operational than technical.
The gap is real, but I think it's less about brands versus AI and more about who's accountable when the trip goes sideways. Booking.com's own numbers show 62% of travelers have already used AI to plan or book, but only 12% want AI deciding for them. That's not really a trust problem with AI... it's a delegation problem. What this doesn't quite land on is that brand trust in hospitality is operational, not reputational. It runs on loyalty continuity, payment accuracy, human escalation, service recovery. h2c found 78% of hotel chains already use AI, but only 8% have a company-wide strategy. So it's not that guests are scared of AI. It's that our PMS and CRS systems can barely talk to each other, let alone support autonomous anything. And,,, "68% prefer a trusted brand over an AI platform" sounds like a moat, but that's survey data, not booking behavior. Adoption is moving fastest among younger and frequent travelers, which are the segments that tend to set the pattern for everyone else. The winners here won't be brands that sit behind the trust gap like it's a wall. They'll be the ones that wire accountability into the AI layer so guests actually feel safe delegating.