This insight summarises Skift Data & AI Summit 2026 Roundtable: When AI Knows Travelers Better Than Brands Do, Who Owns the Relationship?, published on Skift on 29 June 2026 in collaboration with Mindtrip.
The context has moved outside the brand. A loyal guest can still feel like a stranger at check-in, while an AI assistant already knows their favourite destinations, preferred room type, and spending patterns. Travellers are now handing rich preference data — family constraints, dietary needs, budget concerns, trip ambitions — to AI planners in conversations that never touch an airline PNR or a hotel PMS.
Personalisation is shifting from prediction to persistent understanding. Loyalty profiles, booking history, and segments were built to predict what a traveller might want. AI planners accumulate an evolving picture of who the traveller is across trips — and can evaluate trade-offs across an entire journey rather than one transaction at a time. Roundtable participants argued that the incumbent question — "How do we target them?" — is being replaced by "How do we stay relevant when we no longer hold the most complete picture?"
Trust and portability move to centre stage. The group returned repeatedly to the idea of a portable traveller profile the customer controls and selectively shares with trusted brands, suppliers, or advisors. The parallel drawn was to search engines: AI discovery risks the same drift toward commercial priorities unless the trust layer is designed in. Personalisation only works when travellers believe sharing more will help them decide better.
Most brands already have the data. They just can't surface it. Hospitality was the recurring example. Major chains hold years of guest history yet fail to make it visible at check-in, in service moments, or in recommendations. The bottleneck is rarely data collection — it's data trapped inside disconnected systems that never reach the people who could act on it.
Where to focus:
- Treat AI-era personalisation as context accumulation, not campaign targeting.
- Fix the last-mile surfacing problem — get existing guest data to the front desk, the concierge, and the outbound comms before investing in more collection.
- Prepare for a world of traveller-controlled portable profiles rather than brand-owned ones.
- Position your brand as a trusted advisor in the AI decision layer, not just a supplier the assistant queries.