This panel session at ITB Berlin 2026, moderated by Dirk Rogl (Managing Director, Travel Commerce GmbH), examines whether the travel technology stack is ready for AI agents. The two main speakers are Mathis Boldt, CEO of GIATA (formerly spent 20 years building Booking.com and GetYourGuide), and Bradley Johnson, VP of Product Management at Sabre.
Mathis Boldt opens with a provocative framing: 'AI is only as good as the underlying data — and in travel, data equals expectations.' He argues that the industry has been promising a 'connected trip' and 'personalization' since 2012 without delivering on either, and that the core problem is a foundational data challenge, not an AI capability gap. He illustrates this with a vivid case study: a wealthy Canadian family booked a wedding venue and hotel 15 kilometers apart, only to discover on the day before the wedding that a mountain made the actual road distance 80 km — because a single data point was mathematically accurate but operationally catastrophic. He uses this to argue that entrusting a €10,000 travel booking to an AI agent requires far higher data accuracy than ordering coffee beans online.
Boldt describes GIATA's product suite addressing these gaps. GIATA Multicodes assigns every hotel in the world a universal 'GIATA ID' (analogous to a social security number or ISIN) to eliminate duplicate and mismatched property listings across supplier databases. Room type mapping solves the problem of a single hotel having 130+ different room type combinations across 9 suppliers, making AI-driven rate comparison impossible without normalization. GIATA Drive is a 'source of truth' platform where hotels can self-manage granular property data (facts, amenities, room types, images) and distribute it in formats including JSON compatible with MCP, making hotel websites directly machine-readable for agentic AI. GIATA also acquired a company called Smart Seere, an AI decisioning platform that profiles website visitors in milliseconds to predict intent, willingness to spend, and churn likelihood, then matches them with the right offer at the right funnel stage (e.g., showing vouchers to early-stage visitors who are about to leave, sponsored listings to mid-funnel undecided users, and clean product pages to ready-to-book visitors).
Bradley Johnson presents Sabre's perspective on the full agentic commerce funnel: discovery, retailing, checkout, and servicing. On discovery, Sabre is building a normalized product catalog mixing static and fresh-cached data to deliver low-latency, low-cost results, noting that existing retail commerce protocols lack the structured data and relevancy travel requires. On checkout, he emphasizes keeping the customer in-channel all the way through secure payment, fraud detection, and supplier reconciliation, using 'deterministic workflows' that sequence required steps with configurability for partner needs. On servicing, he identifies it as 'the biggest opportunity when it comes to Agentic AI in terms of driving out cost,' specifically citing proactive disruption sensing — e.g., an 80% flight disruption probability alert — as transformative for traveler experience.
Sabre's flagship live case study is a newly announced partnership with Mindrip and PayPal, demonstrated live on stage: a conversational travel booking flow where a user asks 'What are the best dates to fly from New York to Alaska?' receives the answer 'Your ideal window is late August to mid-September,' then books through Sabre's shopping APIs, Mindrip's agentic UX, and PayPal for payment. Johnson confirmed this is a real product, not a demo concept, though full availability is described as 'very soon.'
In the moderated Q&A wrap-up, Boldt cites a recent GIFT study finding only 2% of travelers today are comfortable letting an AI agent make purchases on their behalf, and stresses that the industry must continue serving customers across all channels — offline agents, tour operators (which he notes are still growing despite decades of predictions otherwise), and AI. Both speakers converge on 'human in the loop' as the key trust mechanism for moving agentic commerce down the funnel from inspiration to transaction. Both predict agentic travel bookings are 'months away' rather than years, with Boldt adding that higher-value summer vacations will lag behind lower-stakes corporate travel.
And ladies and gentlemen, we coming to the session I'm really looking for uh just because it's the core of our track today. Are we ready for AI? And just as a very short wrap-up for from from our yesterday's AI track. Anka is saying referring to uh to to to Airbnb, it may take three years since we see aic shopping. When we listen to to our dedicated speakers from yesterday, it takes a few months just because everything is available. Instant pay instant payment is available. Agentic shopping infr...
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