This insight summarises AI Agents Transforming Travel Distribution: Who Wins at the Point of Decision?, an ITB Berlin interview with Bhanu Chopra, Founder and Managing Director of RateGain Travel Technologies, published on Hotel News Resource in September 2026.
Six months after ITB Berlin. Chopra sees uneven but real progress: the industry has moved from sandbox experiments to live agent deployments, and from basic chatbots toward autonomous agentic systems. The bottleneck is not the models. "Everyone can build a bot now. The hard part is the plumbing underneath it." If PMS, CRM, and booking data are fragmented, "no model layered on top will save you." Legacy silos between pricing and marketing slow things further.
What gets disrupted first. Consumer AI agents are collapsing the ten-browser-tab research journey, so discovery changes first. The most exposed layer is "the middle layer whose entire job was aggregation and comparison." Players that control inventory and pricing are less vulnerable. The competition is shifting from booking channels to the point of decision.
When agents talk to agents. A traveller's agent querying a hotel's pricing or distribution agent directly turns periodic updates into "a live conversation." Hotels with smart pricing agents gain leverage, but only if their data and commercial rules are structured and real time. Accountability when autonomous agents transact across companies is still unresolved.
Who owns the guest? "Hotels own something no model can manufacture": years of proprietary guest data and direct relationships. That is a moat AI can activate. The risk is that new AI intermediaries become the next gatekeepers, and Chopra expects both outcomes to coexist.
Three steps to take now:
- Fix your data before buying another AI tool, and treat it as a board-level priority.
- Make distribution agent-ready, so rates, availability, and offers work in real-time machine transactions.
- Break down silos between revenue, marketing, and distribution.
Why this matters for hotels. The advantage will go to operators who do the unglamorous data and distribution work now. As Chopra puts it: "Stay curious but move."