Google Search & Ads in a Future with Agentic (The Future of Search is built for Traveler)

Google's Yannis Simaiakis (Director, Travel & Local Partnerships EMEA) and Anna Sawbridge (Director, Travel) delivered a dual keynote at ITB Berlin 2026 outlining how Google Search and Ads are evolving in response to agentic AI and shifting traveler behavior. The session opened by framing the core shift: travelers now expect deeply contextual, personalized, and conversational experiences—they want AI to delegate tedious planning tasks and provide proactive assistance when travel disruptions occur.

Simaiakis walked through Google's evolving product suite. AI Overviews, which was not even live in Germany at ITB 2025, now covers nearly all of Europe—reaching 2 billion users globally. AI Mode, launched in the US in May and rapidly rolled out worldwide, handles longer, more nuanced conversational queries and has 75 million daily active users. The Gemini app—with Google Flights and Hotels already integrated—has surpassed 750 million active users. Google Maps now features conversational AI for on-the-go travel assistance.

A key personalization use case highlighted: Google uses Gmail email history to surface preferred hotel chains and leverages Google Wallet data (credit cards, loyalty programs) to display exclusive or corresponding rates with higher confidence during hotel and flight searches. A late-November announcement revealed Google is testing in-search bookings directly within AI Mode, enabling users to complete hotel reservations without leaving the search experience—partnering with select travel brands for this experiment.

Post-booking, Google Wallet becomes a proactive travel companion: parsing reservations automatically, surfacing upgrade deals pre-flight, providing a unified digital ID and boarding pass hub at airports, and—critically—offering automated rebooking when flights are cancelled.

Sawbridge reframed the consumer journey entirely, replacing the traditional funnel with four overlapping behaviors: streaming, shopping, searching, and scrolling—all co-occurring on Google and YouTube. She emphasized that trust is the differentiating factor: travelers trust Google more than any social network or chatbot, making it the bridge between brand awareness and booking conversion.

On advertising, Sawbridge introduced AI Max, described as an 'always-on Scout' campaign type that uses all of Google's AI tools simultaneously to match brands to complex, long-tail queries in real time—without requiring exact keyword bids. This unlocks 'billions of searches' previously unreachable due to query complexity. Hilton was cited as a case study: partnering with agency Dentsu, they deployed AI Max with guard rails on AI tone, resulting in 58% of bookings influenced, 33% of clicks from only 19% of spend.

Both speakers concluded with a unified framework: travel brands must invest in three areas—first-party data (so Google can find lookalike audiences), unstructured content (videos, UGC, reviews that feed multimodal AI), and structured feed data (precise pricing and availability for zero-wastage targeting). The session's overarching message was that AI is not replacing search but supercharging it, with query volumes growing as users realize AI can answer more complex questions than before.