Between 2018 and 2024, neo-banks grew their share of the UK banking market from 16% to 50%. The incumbents that lost ground had strong brands, loyal customers, and decades of trust. What they didn’t have was frictionless resolution.
Customers didn’t just leave for better rates. They left for time back, faster fixes, instant answers, problems solved before they became problems.
Travel is approaching the same inflection point. And the trigger is AI.
Price will still matter. It will always matter. But in the AI era, price alone will not be enough to win, or keep, the customer. As discovery and booking become faster and easier, competitive advantage shifts downstream, to what happens after the booking.
Servicing is becoming the next battleground for acquisition, retention, margin, and trust. Most of the industry is not equipped to compete there.
The companies that win won’t just help travelers find the best option. They’ll resolve problems with the least effort.
That shift exposes a large gap: the growing gap between traveler expectations for instant resolution and the industry’s ability to deliver it.
That gap has a name — the Execution Gap
1 RFI Global’s UK banking survey, published February 2025
AI is changing how travel is won.
Not by replacing agencies — but by shifting where competition happens.
For years, travel has competed at the front of the funnel: search position, price, conversion.
Now, as AI makes discovery faster and easier, that advantage is being commoditised.
The battleground is moving downstream.
To what happens after the booking.
Price isn’t going away. It still drives acquisition.
But in the AI era, it’s no longer enough.
Because for the first time:
These aren’t satisfaction metrics.
They’re retention signals.
AI isn’t just changing search. It’s changing what gets considered.
Travelers can now ask:
And get an answer — instantly.
At the same time, AI models are already incorporating:
You can’t bid your way into those signals. They’re earned.
Travel has automated ~40% of servicing.
The remaining 60% — the most complex, highest-stakes scenarios — still rely on manual processes.
That 60%:
This is the Execution Gap:
For OTAs
Servicing is no longer just retention — it’s acquisition.
For TMCs
White-glove service has to scale.
But they expect:
This isn’t a feature.
It’s the new baseline.
AI is not eliminating OTAs or TMCs.
But it is exposing where advantage actually lives.
The companies that close the Execution Gap:
In the AI era, execution is the brand.
They’ve spent a decade experiencing frictionless resolution in banking, retail, and subscription services. They know what instant looks like. They know what good feels like. And that expectation travels with them into every cancellation, every exchange, every delay.
As AI reduces friction in discovery and booking, traveler expectations for servicing rise alongside it.
Planning a trip that once required multiple tabs, reviews, and comparisons can increasingly happen in a single conversational flow. Travelers can ask broad questions, refine options instantly, and evaluate providers in seconds.
That expectation does not stop at discovery.
If finding the right flight takes seconds, travelers increasingly expect resolving a disruption to work the same way.
Where should I go in April for good weather?
What are the best flight options under £500?
Which of these providers is most reliable if something goes wrong?
At the same time, AI is changing what gets surfaced.
For the first time, servicing quality is moving upstream into the purchase decision itself. Reputation signals — reliability, reviews, disruption handling, post-booking support — increasingly influence what brands are recommended.
This shift is already happening.
Platforms like Skyscanner have introduced “Recommended Provider” badges based not just on price, but on booking reliability and servicing quality. One leading OTA saw conversion increase by 20% after being recognised as a recommended provider.
In an AI-mediated world, reputation becomes visible earlier in the journey — and reputation is built at the back of the funnel.
The expectation has been set. But travel’s infrastructure hasn’t kept up.
For years, the industry managed servicing through human scale.
When demand increased, companies hired more agents. When disruption volumes rose, operational teams expanded again. Better servicing came at the expense of higher cost-to-serve.
That tradeoff was manageable when servicing was viewed primarily as a cost centre.
In the AI era, it becomes a competitive constraint.
Travelers increasingly expect instant, seamless resolution. But the operational model underpinning much of the industry still relies heavily on manual intervention for the moments that matter most.
Two gaps sit inside the Execution Gap:
Travelers expect instant, seamless resolution, in fact 45% say their preferred way to resolve a disruption is to be notified automatically, before they have to do anything. But only 23% actually experienced that. 13% gave up and went direct to the airline.
Travel has automated roughly 40% of servicing scenarios — simple cancellations, clean refunds, basic exchanges. The remaining 60% — the complex, rule-heavy edge cases that define the traveler experience when things go wrong — still depends heavily on manual intervention. And that 60% consumes 82% of agents’ time.
The result is compounding pressure:
Ultimately, the moments that matter most are still the moments the industry is least equipped to handle.
Brand-led OTAs invested in trust and the full customer relationship. Conversion-led OTAs optimised acquisition — and largely ignored what happened after booking. For years, it didn’t matter. Now it does.
Price still wins the booking. It always will. But price alone no longer defends the relationship, or wins it in the first place. In the AI era, servicing is the second half of the value equation.
This shift applies across the entire customer base. Price and servicing now sit side by side, for once-a-year and frequent travelers alike — because both are visible, and both are easy to evaluate in the AI-driven journey.
The difference is economic. The impact concentrates with frequent travelers, where lifetime value is built, and where servicing, alongside price, determines whether they come back.
Flexibility is part of the same equation. Flexible fares are servicing products dressed as booking features. When they work, they reduce risk, build trust, and justify a premium. When they don’t, they do the opposite.
There is a compounding effect:
And the stakes are higher than retention alone. Airlines have structural advantages — direct customer relationships, control over pricing and inventory. For years, the assumption was that distribution shifts or pricing advantages would gradually push travelers toward booking direct. But that logic only holds if the experience is equivalent. It isn’t.
The OTA advantage has always been breadth — multi-carrier options, the connected trip, comparison, convenience. In the AI era, that advantage only holds if it is matched by execution. Because when something goes wrong, the question isn’t: “Who sold me this ticket?” It’s: “Who can fix this fastest and the easiest?”
In an AI-mediated world, you’ll be discovered by algorithm. But you won’t win and retain on price alone. You’ll be remembered — or forgotten — by how you execute when things go wrong.
49% of all travelers are comfortable with AI handling automated rebooking during a disruption. Among frequent corporate travelers that rises to 76%. Only 7% say they would never want anything handled automatically.
The question isn’t whether travelers will accept AI in servicing. It’s whether agencies will build it in a way that meets their expectations.
Those expectations are clear:
want instant notification with a clear summary of what has changed
want a simple one-tap option to accept, modify, or reject the rebooking
want confidence that downstream impacts — hotel, transfers, connecting bookings — have been checked and handled
Among corporate travelers those numbers are higher.
Travelers don’t want AI to assist. They want it to act — proactively, accurately, and with full visibility of what has been done and why.
For OTAs, it means enabling seamless self-service resolution, with intelligent escalation to a human agent when absolutely needed.
For TMCs, it means scaling white-glove service through automation, freeing agents to focus where they add value.
The experience changes fundamentally.
A disruption occurs. The traveler is notified immediately. Options are pre-calculated, fare rules applied, and the best alternatives surfaced instantly. Resolution happens seamlessly in one interaction.
A complex refund or exchange is requested. The traveler can manage it themselves in 2 clicks.
No queues. No fragmentation. No unnecessary effort. Just resolution.
For years, travel companies faced a structural tradeoff: deliver better servicing by adding more people — or protect margins by limiting operational complexity.
But the definition of great service has changed.
Travelers increasingly value instant, frictionless resolution over speaking to a person for every request. The human touch still matters — but for the moments that genuinely require reassurance, judgement, or complexity, not as the default layer for every interaction.
That changes the economics of servicing entirely.
Among frequent travelers, a well-handled disruption makes them 64% more likely to rebook with the same platform than a poorly handled one.
49% of travelers would choose a platform rated for fast disruption handling over the cheapest option — even at a 5% price premium.
The moments the industry historically treated as operational risk are increasingly becoming loyalty moments.
Better servicing improves reviews, reputation, and recommendation quality — all of which increasingly influence AI-driven discovery.
As discovery becomes more recommendation-led, reputation becomes an acquisition variable.
In the AI era, travelers won’t just choose the provider with the lowest fare. They’ll increasingly choose the provider they trust to resolve problems with the least effort.
Closing the Execution Gap changes more than customer experience. It changes operational economics.
For years, scaling servicing meant scaling headcount. Better service came with higher operational cost and growing complexity.
That tradeoff is beginning to break.
As servicing becomes faster, more automated, and less dependent on manual intervention, companies can improve traveler experience while reducing cost-to-serve.
The companies that close the Execution Gap earliest won’t just deliver better servicing. They’ll build the operational infrastructure required to move faster, scale more efficiently, and stay ahead in the AI era.
AI will not eliminate OTAs or TMCs. But it is changing where they win.
The battleground has moved. It is no longer just about who wins the booking. It is about who earns the next one.
The brands that win will be the ones travelers trust to resolve problems with the least effort.
Price will always matter. But in an AI-mediated world, it is no longer enough to defend the relationship.
Execution is becoming the differentiator. And the companies that close the Execution Gap first will build an advantage that is difficult — and slow — to replicate.
The institutions that moved first in banking retained the most. The agencies that move first here will too.
Wenrix Consumer Research 2026 Methodology:
Research was undertaken with Toluna Corporate Insights, to investigate traveler sentiment and behavior with AI. We surveyed over 2,000 people from different demographics, all of whom have flown for leisure or work within the last 12 months, across 4 countries including the UK, USA, Singapore and United Arab Emirates.
