#207: Evidence

Source: Mauricio Prieto; Travel Tech Essentialist (Substack) · 2026-08-09

One of Skift’s 2026 Megatrends predicted cracks forming in the OTA oligopoly, warning that it’s “extremely difficult to see that the OTAs would emerge from the LLM platform shift unscathed.” AI agents could come between travelers and Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb, reducing them to invisible fulfillment layers. It’s a reasonable case to make, and also a little apocalyptic; the kind of confident narrative that’s easy to write into the obligatory year-end Megatrends predictions.Seven months later, the numbers aren’t cooperating. Expedia traded at a new all-time high of $327 on August 5, the day of its Q2 report, after revenue rose 14%, gross bookings grew 12%, and the company raised full-year guidance. It closed at $311 on August 7, up 61% over the past 12 months. Booking Holdings has gained back most of what it lost earlier this year to that same disintermediation narrative. On August 7, Airbnb had its biggest single-day stock rally ever after boosting its annual revenue forecast for a second time this year. Its shares closed at $178, up 17% for the day and 51% over the past year.

None of this proves AI is irrelevant to travel distribution. It suggests that AI may commoditize discovery, but the companies that hold supply, payments, service, trust, and the ability to complete a booking are not automatically disintermediated. They may become more valuable infrastructure.

Seven months is not seven years. The megatrend could still end up being right. But for now, the companies it warned about are putting up some of their strongest numbers yet.

The global platforms have so far held up far better than the rest of the public travel-market set. Expedia and Airbnb have both materially outperformed the Nasdaq over the past 12 months, while Booking is flat. That is not universal outperformance, but it is a long way from an AI-driven unraveling of the incumbents.

Outside the so-called oligopoly, the picture changes. Trip.com, eDreams ODIGEO, MakeMyTrip, and Tripadvisor are all down over the past 12 months. Trivago, a metasearch business, is the outlier and the group’s strongest performer.

The YTD view makes the split even messier. Trivago and Airbnb are up sharply, eDreams has recovered strongly, and Trip.com, MakeMyTrip, and Tripadvisor remain down.

“OTA” is too broad a category for the AI-disintermediation story. Different travel platforms have different economics, geographies, and exposure to the agentic future.

In December 2024, I published “21 ridiculously specific predictions for 2025”. I'll grade the full set at the end of this year, but I'll go ahead and grade Prediction 18 early. It said that a travel advisor marketplace would hit $1 billion in bookings with over 10,000 independent advisors, proving the creator economy model works in luxury travel. Last month, Fora closed a $60 million Series D at a $1 billion valuation. The company reached its first billion in bookings in three years, its second in eight months, its third in five, and it has more than 15,000 active advisors, 97% of whom are new to the profession.

According to an OAG post, a developer recently pointed an AI agent at Etihad’s website and asked it to find one flight. The agent returned 881,076 fare options, quietly crawling every date, stopover, and route combination a human never would.

That’s the economics problem agentic travel is running into. A human search has a natural brake: people get tired, bored, or satisfied with “good enough.” Agents don’t. OAG estimates the industry has gone from roughly 100 to 200 searches per ticket sold in the early online era, to somewhere around 10,000 to 20,000 today. Amadeus and Sabre have both pointed to a possible future of up to 200,000 searches per ticket sold once agents are doing the shopping.

Someone pays for all that compute. Amadeus’s answer, according to its president of travel Decius Valmorbida, is to stop calculating a fresh price for every single query. Instead, for common routes and dates, Amadeus precomputes likely fares in advance and serves those saved answers instantly, refreshing them periodically rather than recalculating from scratch every time an agent asks.

If agents end up doing much of the shopping, the fare itself is not the only thing that matters. The infrastructure that decides which fares an agent sees, how quickly it sees them, and whether the offer can still be honored matters too. That gives whoever runs the cache, refresh logic, and revalidation layer real influence over the market. An airline whose offers are less current or less reliably bookable risks being repriced at checkout, or becoming a worse option for the agent to recommend.