Travel Compass 2026 Study – How Market Development Is Driven by New Business Models and AI
Summary
Dr. Markus Heller presents key findings from the Travel Compass 2026 study, conducted for PayPal, as an opening overview for the ITB Berlin 2026 day track. The study covers the German outbound travel market's performance data for 2024/25 and outlook into 2026, spotlighting revenue growth alongside a still-incomplete traveler volume recovery post-COVID.
It then shifts to AI's growing role in travel planning and booking, before outlining five emerging business models reshaping the tour operator landscape — from airline-led holiday packages to DMC-as-operator and OTA evolution.
Key Takeaways
- •The German outbound travel market reached 23.3 billion euros in revenue for the touristic year 2024/25, representing 6% year-on-year growth — a strong industry signal.
- •Traveler volumes reached 22.6 million, but this did not grow proportionally to revenue, indicating that fewer people are traveling compared to pre-COVID levels — the volume recovery gap persists.
- •Average travel product prices increased by 11%, equating to approximately 180 euros more per person spent during the holiday season, which helps explain the volume shortfall.
- •The FTI insolvency in 2024 created a temporary but significant spike in rebookings visible in the booking data, distorting year-over-year comparisons.
- •Early 2026 booking figures show a 5% decline compared to 2024, and January — traditionally a strong early-booking month — is losing importance as bookings shift to November/December of the prior year.
- •30–40% of travelers are already using AI for travel ideas and planning, including destination research, itinerary building, and asking clarifying questions about destinations.
- •AI is beginning to influence pricing strategies and price comparison behavior, with implications for how tour operators manage yield and differentiation.
- •64% of customers who use AI in travel planning consider it useful, indicating broad acceptance despite ongoing concerns about reliability and accuracy of AI outputs.
- •Five business model shifts are identified: (1) airline-holiday packages, (2) modern airline distribution via One Order reducing GDS dependency, (3) AI-enabled classic tour operator transformation, (4) DMCs evolving into direct package sellers, (5) OTAs developing next-generation platform models.
- •The Iran conflict introduced uncertainty into the 2026 forward booking picture, with the cruise track specifically requiring program adjustments at the event.
- •The Travel Compass 2026 white paper is publicly available for download and serves as the research backbone for the day's panel discussions.
Transcript
I'm really delighted to have you all here and thank you very much for this full house and um yes I would like to start very quickly with a short introduction and you will see it's a kind of study we conducted and it will show you how we structure the day today and um how we get into the details of the day. So first of all um this is just the program. You will find it on also online. We had some some differences um to the first program because we had to change a little bit um coming from the um s...
