From Search to Service: How LLMs and In-Chat Integrations Are Remaking Travel

From Search Engine to “Everything App”: The New Customer Starting Point

What was once a dozen browser tabs for booking a vacation is now a single conversation, turning travel planning from a chore into a dialogue.

The traditional traveler’s journey began in the search bar with fragmented queries like “flights to Rome” or “best hotels Barcelona.” Today, the starting point is increasingly a chat window. When a user opens an LLM assistant, they initiate a single, comprehensive dialogue, such as, “Plan a 5-day trip to Rome for under $2,000.” In this new paradigm, the assistant instantly acts as the search engine, aggregator, travel agent, and booking platform, all in one unified experience.

The urgency of this change is validated by consumer behavior. According to First Page Sage, travel & hospitality is a top vertical where consumers use ChatGPT in a purchase journey, with about 18% of customers in the segment reporting usage.[1] Gen Z travelers are nearly twice as likely as Boomers to use generative AI when researching destinations or building itineraries. [2]

This isn't a distant trend; it's a current reality requiring immediate strategic response from the industry. Effectively, the conversational interface is becoming the new “everything app” for travel, managing research, recommendations, booking, and itinerary management without the user ever leaving the dialogue.

Expedia found that one in three travelers are now open to using AI to plan their next trip, signaling a significant shift from traditional search-based discovery. [2]

How In-Chat Travel Integrations Actually Work

The mechanics driving this transformation rely on deep, established partnerships between the AI front-end and established travel infrastructure. The core process involves the user submitting a natural language query, the LLM leveraging exposed APIs from booking engines, and presenting a fully formed, bookable itinerary back to the user within the chat interface.

LLM as Front-End

The user interacts by typing a natural language query directly into the chat interface instead of launching a browser to compare prices across multiple airlines, hotels, or reviews. The LLM processes the intent and context of this human language query.

Seamless Itinerary Creation

The LLM synthesizes the retrieved data into a structured, actionable itinerary presented inline. For example, the user receives options like: "Here are three flight + hotel bundles within budget, with day-by-day activity recommendations, which you can refine by cuisine or neighborhood directly within this chat."

One-Stop Booking

Friction is eliminated as the user finalizes the transaction within the dialogue. By clicking or tapping an option, the user confirms payment details, and the booking is completed without ever navigating to a separate, traditional website. For example, asking for a boutique hotel in Rome under $2,000 triggers an LLM call to the partner, which fetches, lays out, and finalizes the preferred bundle within the chat window.

Case in Point: ChatGPT × Expedia

This year ChatGPT launched a native integration with Expedia, allowing users to plan, refine, and even start booking trips directly inside the chat interface. The feature leverages Expedia’s API to pull live pricing, hotel availability, and itinerary options, then links users to Expedia to finalize bookings. This partnership marked one of the first large-scale examples of an LLM acting as a functional travel assistant, moving beyond search into full-funnel service.

 The $1.48 Trillion Question: Where Does the Value Go?

The financial impact of AI across industries is estimated at $1.48 trillion, a signal that this shift is not incremental but transformative.[1]  For the travel and hospitality sector, that number represents a massive redistribution of value as conversational AI becomes the dominant channel for discovery and booking. 

This value is being captured in new ways:

Affiliate/Partner Fees

Booking platforms that successfully integrate with LLMs capture a commission fee when the AI successfully funnels a user toward completing a transaction on their site or via their API connection.

Direct Bookings

Travel brands that are fully integrated into the AI ecosystem bypass the cost of traditional search engine marketing (SEM) and display advertising by securing bookings directly through the AI recommendation layer. TrekAI, for instance, is focusing its development on making its proprietary inventory data instantly parseable by leading LLM partners to secure these direct flows.

Upsells & Add-ons

The LLM’s superior understanding of user intent and historical preferences allows for highly personalized, contextually relevant upselling. The system can suggest perfectly timed add-ons, such as, “Would you like to pre-book a private cooking class in Trastevere on day three?”

Visibility and Recommendation

Crucially, the recommendation engine within the LLM becomes the new "first screen" in the customer journey. Brands that lack this visibility are effectively forfeiting the upstream revenue opportunity to the platforms that are integrated.

Impact for Marketers: The End of SEO as We Know It?

The landscape of digital presence is shifting, meaning traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is evolving into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This new focus centers on structuring brand data so that LLMs can consume, trust, and prioritize the brand in their responses.

Traditional SEO vs. GEO

Traditional SEO was focused on external factors like ranking web pages for keywords on Google, maintaining a strong backlink profile, and optimizing meta tags. GEO, conversely, is focused on internal data structure, such as utilizing tidy schema markup, ensuring well-structured content, clearly defining value propositions, accumulating strong review signals, and achieving integration readiness with AI partners.

The New Key Question

The focus changes from, “Will my page appear on Google’s page 1?” to “Will I appear as the AI-assistant’s recommended option in the conversation?” If a hotel brand like TrekAI doesn't have its amenities and pricing data easily parsable via a standardized API or structured format, it may become entirely invisible to this rapidly growing segment of users who bypass the browser entirely.

Why This Matters

For travelers, the future of trip planning is frictionless. What once took a dozen tabs, hours of research, and multiple booking portals now happens in a single, intelligent conversation. The AI doesn’t just search, it listens, learns, and designs the journey around you. Your next vacation may begin and end entirely within one chat window.

For brands, the implications are even more profound. The first recommendation inside an AI chat is the new front page of the internet. There’s no second screen or fallback click, if your brand doesn’t appear in that conversational answer, you’re invisible to the traveler. Visibility no longer lives in Google’s search results; it lives in the response layer of large language models.

This marks a complete inversion of digital marketing logic. SEO once determined who got found. Now, GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, decides who gets chosen. The brands that supply structured, verifiable data, maintain clean API connections, and establish trusted integrations will be the ones that the model “knows” and recommends. Everyone else will simply be left out of the conversation, and therefore, off the itinerary.

In this new travel economy, integration is the new marketing. Success depends on being part of the AI’s answer set, the invisible layer where preference and purchase converge. If you’re not in the answer, you’re not on the itinerary.

The New Travel Playbook

The travel industry is entering its most profound reinvention since the rise of online booking. What began as a convenience-driven digital shift has evolved into an intent-driven, conversational ecosystem powered by large language models. With tools like ChatGPT and Expedia’s in-chat integrations now guiding real bookings, the boundary between inspiration and transaction is dissolving in real time.

For travelers, this means the era of fragmented planning is ending, a single chat can now serve as concierge, agent, and companion. For brands, however, it signals an existential pivot: visibility no longer lives on Google’s search results but in the recommendation logic of AI systems. Success will hinge on structured data, transparent partnerships, and the ability to feed intelligent platforms the same way we once optimized for algorithms.

Travelers increasingly expect personalization, immediacy, and authenticity, the very hallmarks of AI-mediated engagement. The winners of this new landscape won’t just adapt to conversational commerce; they’ll design for it. Those who do will redefine loyalty, transforming every query from “search” into “service.”