... and what it means for travel advisors.
Every year, World Tourism Day shines a spotlight on the issues shaping the future of our industry. For 2026, the theme is, as ever, particularly relevant for travel businesses navigating a rapidly evolving landscape: “digital agenda and artificial intelligence to redesign tourism.”
Each year’s theme adds to the wider goal of World Tourism Day, to raise awareness of tourism’s social, cultural, political and economic value, with a specific theme on top of this overarching aim. This year might, at first glance, sound like another conversation about just chatbots and AI-powered trip planners; but the reality is more far-reaching.
This year’s theme focuses on how digital technologies, artificial intelligence, digital identity, smart destinations, sustainability and digital access for tourism businesses can help create a more connected, inclusive, and efficient travel ecosystem. It is a conversation about the digital optimisation of travel’s infrastructure, with the use of AI.
For travel advisors, this is more than the concern over the use of AI trip planners. It's an opportunity to understand how travellers are changing, how suppliers are evolving, and how smarter systems can help deliver better travel experiences: for the greater good.
The Resilient Growth of Travel and Tourism
So, why does travel need to be redesigned? For this, there are a few key factors.
According to UN Tourism, international tourist arrivals reached 1.52 billion in 2025, rising 4% year-over-year and setting a new record for recent years, and is set to remain resilient for the years to come, with destination spend predicted to reach $3 trillion by 2035, from recent forecasting from Oxford Economics. International tourism volumes are also set to grow by 60%+ by 2035, compared to last year’s data.
Add to this that the economic impact of travel is as strong as ever, with a record US$11.6 trillion added to the global economy in 2025, an estimated 360+ million jobs supported by the industry, with forecasts suggesting this will only increase in 2026 and beyond.
With these factors in mind, it becomes clear that this year’s theme for World Tourism Day is speaking to the bigger picture of travel in this moment: the volume of growth and spend might be stabilising in a positive trajectory, but the cost of the travel chain and industry-wide fragmentation are not.
The question now is not necessarily where more bookings are going to come from, but what can be done to do more with every booking.
How AI and digital transformation can bring more value to each booking for all involved, from data-driven sustainability, more frictionless travel experiences from planning to digital identity, and AI-supported promotion, to name a few examples.
So, for travel advisors – we can consider:
How travellers are using AI now
Where the right travel partners are providing AI-powered improvements to the booking journey
How much trust AI has in tourism and how this might impact where travel goes next...
How are travellers using AI to travel plan?
For many people, not just travellers, AI adoption is not a question anymore: artificial intelligence is a part of life, and certainly a part of the travel journey, from inspiration to the in-destination experience and beyond, as a result.
Recent Phocuswright research found that 56% of travellers used AI for planning, booking, or in-destination assistance on at least one trip in the previous 12 months, up from 43% in the second half of 2025 and 33% in the first half of 2025.
Even more significantly, travellers are increasingly willing to let AI play a direct role in their travel-booking decisions:
43% for planning, booking or in-destination help.
56% used AI on at least one trip in the previous twelve months, as of 2026.
44% would book directly inside an AI platform.
40% would let an agentic assistant handle flights and hotel bookings.
Of course, travellers are increasingly expecting faster, more seamless trip planning, with highly-personalised recommendations, accessible destination information and real-time support during their journey.
The intention of travellers to integrate AI into their booking journey, from inspiration all the way through to return, is unlikely to slow down. And when it comes to traveller needs, AI can help satisfy these expectations by reducing research time, surfacing relevant options more quickly, and helping travellers discover destinations they might not have considered before.
Are travel advisors still relevant?
For travel advisors, this shift shouldn't be viewed as a threat. Instead, it highlights changing customer expectations.
Despite the uplift in AI-trip planners, many travellers are still relying on the expertise of travel advisors at different stages of the booking journey:
Booking: While AI might be more heavily involved in the planning stage of travel, bringing together recommendations, sights, trip pacing and destinations, limitations still arise when it comes to converting this into a bookable itinerary that fits a travellers’ unique constraints: budget, timing, accessibility, any loyalty statuses, personal needs.
This is where the travel advisor still reigns, where your expertise in handling the complex processes, experience and product supplier relationships and the unique, human-specific ability to weigh up the true needs of the traveller and balance this with their wants and capabilities.
Support: whether in-destination or at any time of the booking journey, it’s the humanity of the advisor that any traveller will look to, for someone to advocate for them, navigate any policies and resolve issues with the empathy we all need in times of stress.
How Are Travel Businesses Using AI for Tourism?
While traveller adoption may be grabbing headlines, some of the most significant changes are happening behind the scenes.
According to Phocuswright, 61% of travel businesses are already experimenting with or scaling agentic AI systems, while 62% expect technology budgets to increase during 2026. More than half are also exploring interoperability standards that allow AI systems to communicate and work across multiple platforms.
From future uses to everyday operations
To streamline the booking in a way that is meaningful for today’s, and tomorrow’s travellers—reducing friction, not adding it—this requires something a bit less glamourous: data quality.
The vision that arises with ‘AI to redesign travel’ relies on clean, connected and reliable data infrastructure—something that many travel businesses claim is the largest blocker for them.
This pattern was supported at this year’s HBX Group MarketHub events, when this question was posed to the room, and 34% of attendees cited technology fragmentation as their biggest challenge.
This ‘practicality of AI’ was also discussed by HBX Group’s Javier Cabrerizo, Chief Strategy Transformation & AI Officer, during this year’s MarketHub event cycle—how AI is helping travel businesses automate processes, anticipate demand, and inform decision-making.
The need for AI and travel selling to complement each other, for the industry to streamline with the ‘big picture’ in mind when it comes to enabling AI-automation while simultaneously empowering travel sellers is key. The aim, Javier said at MarketHub, is to ‘create more value across the travel ecosystem’. Which is a key message, and one firmly in line with this year’s World Tourism Day theme.
As UN Tourism itself says, ‘Smart destinations, personalised recommendations, sustainable tourism measurement, and digital identity solutions all depend on accurate and accessible data.’
This is where the topics of connectivity, real-time rate data and streamlining inventory supply chains become essential as part of the same conversation as AI in travel, rather than separate, as though these infrastructures are not all connected and essential to work alongside each other.
So, with this in mind, where do travel advisors and travel technology partners come in?
Bedsonline: Smart Booking Processes for Today’s Advisors
At Bedsonline, intelligent technology already helps partners identify relevant products, surface competitive offers, and connect travellers with the right product at the right price, and importantly, at the right time.
Advanced in-house algorithms for travel recommendations
Our intelligent algorithms empower agents with a streamlined, optimised search and booking experience, by empowering advisors with the most relevant, and therefore most sellable, experience products, offers, and opportunities for each customer in their market.
Whether advisors are accessing market-relevant discounts via our seasonal campaigns, determined by real-time data analysis, surfacing competitive recommendations using our powerful travel and booking marketplace, or accessing personalised growth opportunities via Insights, our recommendation and travel marketing tool, advisors partnering with Bedsonline can sharpen their competitive edge, working alongside AI, rather than having their expertise replaced by it.
Room Mapping
Plus, highly accurate room mapping is also relevant to this year’s theme, and something else that our Booking Engine offers to advisors.
Fragmented supplier data adds speedbumps to the booking process when things don’t align, but room mapping creates structured, consistent, and most importantly, sellable inventory data. A human advisor can often dig through the same rooms listed under different names and work it out; an automated system, or AI agent comparing options cannot.
Rather than suffering booking errors and the impacts of disjointed supply control, traveller sellers of all kinds can benefit from inventory data that is understood and compared across multiple sources, and streamline the booking journey.
Discover more about the Booking Engine, and access this powerful travel marketplace by signing up today:
Improved data quality is essential, and something that both travel advisors, travel businesses and AI-powered systems all rely on. This poses a clear lesson: AI is just as dependent on the data and connectivity that supports it as traditional travel sellers.
What World Tourism Day 2026 Means for Travel Advisors
The biggest takeaway from this year's theme is that AI is not replacing human expertise. It is helping redesign the systems that support travel. For advisors, that means embracing tools that improve efficiency while continuing to deliver the personalised service, reassurance, and destination expertise that travellers still value most in this age of AI.
Three key areas where AI can help redesign travel and what they mean for today’s advisor:
AI redesigns the traveller experience: In reality, for advisors, this translates into the need for high quality inventory data, to allow cross-system comparisons and easy selling.
‘Connected’ travel: Accurate rates and product availability, which can be delivered at the same speed as the request made for it. To achieve this, a travel partner with global connectivity is required—much like Bedsonline, as part of the wider HBX Group ecosystem.
Smarter tourism: Not treating the booking journey like a transaction, but an opportunity to delight, inspire and bring value to each traveller with relevant recommendations, surfaced with ease, considered in line with the sustainable and infrastructural impacts of tourism on host destinations.
As World Tourism Day 2026 approaches, the conversation should not focus solely on the latest AI tool or travel planner, but rather, how advisors sit in the larger, interconnected journey to creating well-connected, intelligent and reliable travel ecosystem, built on high-quality data and transparency that encourages trust from travellers.
For advisors, specifically, this means being equipped to deliver more with every booking, navigating the rise of agentic AI in the space of travel and working alongside it to help clients plan, discover and truly enjoy their next journey.