This insight summarises The Travel Distribution Funnel Is Coming Apart, a Connecting the Dots column by Skift founder Rafat Ali, published on Skift on 30 September 2026.
A question that may be too neat. At Skift Global Forum, one question kept coming up: who owns the customer when AI agents become a normal part of travel? After conversations with Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Bret Taylor (Sierra), Glenn Fogel (Booking Holdings), Ariane Gorin (Expedia Group) and Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Ali concludes the answer is not one new gatekeeper replacing Google.
The funnel splits. For most of the online era, travelers revealed intent in a search box, Google often saw it first, and airlines, hotels and OTAs competed for the click. The emerging model breaks that sequence apart: a traveler starts in one place, gets a recommendation somewhere else, books through a third company and is serviced by a fourth.
What the CEOs said:
- Booking Holdings: LLM referrals drive less than 1% of room nights, while transactions coming direct are in the mid-60% range. Discovery is moving to AI faster than commerce, and Fogel argued trust is now the scarce asset.
- Expedia Group: Answer-engine optimisation is its fastest-growing channel. It works with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, sells its inventory, payments and servicing into other companies' products, and moved from a single end-to-end agent to specialised agents.
- Uber: Most Uber and Uber Eats traffic now comes direct, so Uber can run hotel bookings at roughly break-even to strengthen Uber One.
- Airbnb: ChatGPT has behaved like a more efficient Google, sending traffic straight to Airbnb. Chesky predicted "many homepages" and many agents.
- Sierra: Taylor argued Google's front-door position never converted into travel commerce, because the last mile (real inventory, working payments, held reservations and service recovery) still decided who got paid.
Why this matters for hotels. No single AI front door is replacing Google, so hotels need to be discoverable across many starting points. The durable advantage sits in the last mile: accurate inventory, dependable payments and service recovery that agents and partners can rely on.