How AI Agents Are Reshaping Travel Margins

The travel industry faces its biggest margin threat since OTAs emerged: AI agents that can bypass the high-profit extras that keep direct booking economics viable. For decades, the primary challenge was winning the search battle to bring travelers to a direct booking site. Today, a new shift is underway as agentic AI begins to reshape how travelers discover and book their journeys. This transition is moving the industry toward a delegated future where autonomous agents handle the logistics, often bypassing the traditional touchpoints that brands have relied on for decades to drive loyalty and growth.

The silent threat to ancillary revenue

The increasing use of AI agents in the travel booking process, including flights and hotels, poses a threat to the established travel booking process. These agents prioritize efficiency and specific user intent, which means high margin extras like premium seating, lounge access, or travel protection can be deprioritized or skipped entirely.

Picture this: A traveler asks their AI agent to book a flight to Miami. The agent finds the cheapest option, completes the transaction, and confirms it all without surfacing seat selection, trip insurance, or lounge access. The booking happens. The margin evaporates.

In an agent-managed flow, the default experience often optimizes for completion: fewer steps, fewer choices, and fewer trade-offs. Unless a traveler explicitly asks for upgrades or protection, those offers are deprioritized, reducing attach rates even when the underlying demand still exists.

This shift introduces a material risk to ancillary revenue, which remains one of the most important profit pools for travel companies seeking to maintain healthy margins.

When the customer journey is managed by an external third-party AI ecosystem, the opportunity to cross-sell or upsell bookings can vanish; the brand exists only as a result within an AI response. This is not just a change in user behavior but a transformation of the economics of direct channels. Without a strategy to intervene at the digital point of sale, travel providers risk becoming mere utilities in a landscape dominated by third-party agents.

Direct booking volume may look stable in the near term, but profitability per booking is the real variable. As agent-led journeys reduce comparison and add-on prompts, the highest-margin “extras” (seat selection, bags, upgrades, protection), get eliminated in favor of speed. That makes now a critical window to strengthen how ancillaries are offered and measured inside the booking flow, before the primary discovery layer shifts further toward third-party agents.

Securing the transaction 

Rokt helps travel companies solve this challenge by embedding an AI-driven relevance engine throughout the entire booking journey, the moment when the customer is buying, and intent is highest. This ensures that even as booking interfaces change, the booking journey continues to drive relevance as an active, high-yield surface. 

This approach helps travel brands consistently surface relevant ancillary value inside the transaction flow, so attached opportunities don’t depend on a specific UI, channel, or discovery experience. By leveraging our AI-powered relevance engine to analyze real-time behavioral and contextual signals, travel brands can surface the most relevant content at the exact moment of highest intent, building deeper customer loyalty. This provides a necessary shield for margins and ensures the brand maintains a direct and profitable relationship with the traveler.  The result: better customer experience, stronger lifetime value, and protected margins, even as AI reshapes how travelers search and book.

A proactive stance on revenue security

The rise of agentic AI does not have to mean the commoditization of travel. By pivoting to a strategy that owns the cart through post-purchase, travel brands can deliver relevance at the exact moment customers are ready to buy, unlocking value for travel brands and their customers.

 The shift toward an agentic future is a call to move toward a strategy of deep, data-driven relevance. Rokt partners with travel brands to strengthen relevance throughout the booking journey as a sustainable competitive advantage. In an agentic future, the ability to deliver the right value in the right second becomes essential to driving sustainable, long-term growth and customer loyalty.

Ready to future-proof your direct channel economics? Learn how Rokt helps travel companies protect margins in an agentic world.