The news: Fears of AI-driven disintermediation splintered travel stocks last week. Online travel agencies (OTA) built on search traffic and paid acquisition saw their stocks slide—while hotel brands that control rooms, pricing, and loyalty data climbed, per Bloomberg. Here’s the year-to-date breakdown through Friday, February 13.

Booking platforms: 

• TripAdvisor: down 29%
• Booking Holdings: down 22%
• Expedia: down 16%
• Airbnb: down 11%

Contrast that with operators:

• Marriott International: up 14%
• Hilton Worldwide: up 12%
• Hyatt Hotels: up 4.4%

Why it’s worth watching: Stock performance reveals that investors are reassessing who controls travel distribution and how people are planning and booking trips.

Deloitte forecast the share of US travelers using genAI tools for trip planning and discovery has tripled, from 8% in 2023 to 24% in 2025. 

Familiarity runs even deeper, 36% of US travelers say they are very familiar with AI-based travel planning tools and use them regularly, while 24% say they have used them occasionally, per Mckinsey and Skift. When more than half of US travelers have already tested AI planning tools, this alters the booking funnel. 

Travel discovery is increasingly beginning inside chatbots instead of search engines. GenAI-driven traffic to US travel sites jumped 3,500% YoY in July 2025 per Adobe, which surveyed 5,000 consumers.

Implications for the industry: Platforms dependent on search rankings and performance marketing will continue to face margin pressure as discovery and booking shifts to AI. 

Travel brands should assess how much demand flows through intermediaries versus owned channels to determine where they could reallocate budgets to channels that build direct, higher-margin relationships.

Brands can reinforce their platforms by strengthening direct booking paths, pushing loyalty value, and prioritizing first-party data for better personalization across email, app, and on-site experiences.