AI became travelers' go-to trip planner in 2026. Most major travel brands are absent from its answers.

Travelers handed much of their trip planning to AI chatbots this year, but the brands they book are often nowhere in the answers. Four in five of America's top 84 travel brands never appear in AI travel conversations, according to new research from Verve discussed on EMARKETER's "Behind the Numbers" podcast. That gap is travel marketers' biggest opportunity and risk heading into 2027.

AI is 2026's new travel agent

Adoption is settled. Nearly two-thirds of travelers under 45 would use AI for recommendations on their next trip, according to Simon-Kucher's "Travel Trends 2026" report. And 54% of US adults who traveled for leisure last year have used AI to plan a trip, according to Mindtrip, Sabre, Sojern, and MMGY Travel Intelligence.

They act on what AI tells them. AI traffic to travel sites jumped 119% YoY in July and now converts nearly as well as non-AI traffic, per Adobe. A year earlier, AI referrals converted 47% worse.

Destinations get the airtime, brands wait their turn

Why are brands missing? Start with how people prompt. Half of the travel conversations Verve tracked were a single prompt, and Google-trained consumers still type keywords. "If you are putting keywords in an AI environment, you're getting keywords out," said Anna Slater, vice president of global brand partnerships at Verve.

Many questions, like the weather in Portugal in March, don't call for a brand at all. Destinations dominate responses because the open web overflows with destination content. When assistants do reach brands, they usually send travelers to metasearch sites rather than replacing them.

Cruise lines surface in three prompts. Car rentals take 14. Subcategory decides how fast a brand shows up, per Verve. Once AI names a cruise line, travelers search for that brand directly, typically considering just one per trip. In cruise, already a loyal category, AI shortens the path to purchase.

Category leaders run away with it. In EMARKETER's AI Visibility Index, Turo appeared in 67% of ChatGPT car rental recommendations, 29 percentage points ahead of Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

2027: from answers to agents

Next comes AI that acts, not just answers. Travelers can already set up agents to hunt for deals at a target price, said EMARKETER senior analyst Gadjo Sevilla. But deals expire fast, and consumers hesitate to hand agents their wallets. Nearly 70% of travelers in the US, UK, and India still book with travel companies over AI chatbots, per Expedia.

Slater likened the hesitation to mobile booking's early days: “Once travelers trust it's safe, the transaction follows. Ads inside chatbots could also push preferred brands into answers regardless of relevance.”

The CMO takeaway: Earn presence before you chase rank

Brand awareness alone won't carry a travel brand into AI answers. "We can't automatically assume that having great brand awareness generally in the public eye equals AI visibility yet," Slater said. In 2027, getting mentioned beats ranking first. 

Three moves will help:

Attach your brand to destinations. Assistants lead with places, so fund destination-adjacent content that gives them a reason to name you.

Make your data machine-readable. Structure prices, amenities, and policies so AI can find and summarize them. Most of it already exists, just not in a format LLMs can use.

Show up where people talk. AI favors recent, human conversation on forums like Reddit. Answer customers there, but skip the astroturf, which erodes the authentic content that makes those forums valuable.