Who Owns the Experience Now? Agentic AI: Winners & Losers
Summary
This closing-session panel at ITB Berlin 2026, moderated by Linda Fox (Executive Editor, PhocusWire), brought together Manuel Hilty (CEO & Co-founder, Nezasa), Kasia Jawien (Senior Director of Activities, Expedia Group), and Arturo Moreno (Chief Supply & Data Officer, Civitatis) to debate who owns the customer experience as agentic AI moves from support tool to autonomous decision-maker in travel.
Fox opened with fresh PhocusWire/Civitatis research framing the stakes: online channels in tours and activities are projected to rise from 17% of bookings in 2019 to 42% by 2029, with OTAs the fastest-growing channel (gross bookings expected to grow more than five-fold over the same period). Yet the sector remains deeply underdigitized — only 33% of gross bookings are online in 2025, versus 64% for the broader global travel industry. The total market is valued at $271 billion today, heading toward $340 billion by 2029.
The panel agreed that AI's most immediate role is normalizing the sector's notoriously fragmented, unstructured supply. Moreno described how Civitatis uses AI to scan for near-duplicate tours in its catalog — a task that was previously manual and hard to do at scale. Jawien referenced Expedia's recently launched Activities API (a B2B solution connecting inventory to 70,000+ partner brands and 200+ travel agencies) as a concrete step toward embedding tours into a wider ecosystem using AI-assisted curation. Hilty argued that for internal operations, any company not aggressively transforming its workflows with AI is already 'dead in the water.'
On agentic AI specifically, the panel discussed the '2% problem': only 2% of companies have reached widespread organizational use of agentic systems, and Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by late 2027 due to poor governance. Hilty provocatively noted that technically a traveler can already ask Claude to book an experience via Expedia today using a credit card — the bottleneck is consumer desire and workflow simplicity, not technical feasibility.
Commercial model dynamics generated the sharpest exchange. Fox asked whether AI-driven discovery would replicate the high-commission friction of OTA dominance. Moreno likened emerging AI monetization to a new form of meta-search: 'In the end it's a new form of metasearch, right, with the same commercial dynamics — and if it's dominated by one or two players, those one or two players will want to make money out of it.' Nobody could agree on a timeline for mainstream agentic booking, though Hilty said it is technically possible today and that the industry may be unconsciously holding itself back by not wanting to overpromise.
Trust emerged as a central theme. Jawien argued that trust will ultimately come from the servicing layer — when a traveler shows up at 7am in front of the Eiffel Tower and no one is there, brand trust collapses regardless of how slick the AI booking was. Moreno argued that trust in AI agents will accumulate through positive experiences with a 'perfect memory' — analogous to how trust in Google grew over time. Hilty urged attendees to stop asking 'what can AI do and how do I adapt' and instead tell AI what should happen and instruct it accordingly.
Key Takeaways
- •Tours and activities online bookings projected to jump from 17% (2019) to 42% (2029), with OTA gross bookings expected to grow more than five-fold in that period — yet the sector is still at only 33% online in 2025 versus 64% for the broader global travel industry. (PhocusWire/Civitatis research, sponsored by Civitatis)
- •Total tours and activities market is currently $271 billion, projected to reach $340 billion by 2029, making the digitization gap a massive commercial opportunity.
- •Only 2% of companies have reached widespread organizational use of agentic AI systems. Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by late 2027 due to poor governance and lack of strategic delegation — Hilty acknowledged tours and activities faces an 'even bigger mountain to climb' given supply-side fragmentation.
- •Civitatis is actively using AI to scan its catalog for near-duplicate or near-identical tours — a task previously done manually at limited scale. This is allowing them to consolidate listings and improve the consumer experience.
- •Expedia recently launched an Activities API as a B2B product, connecting its tour and activity inventory to its 70,000+ global partner brands and 200+ travel agent partners — Jawien described this as a major step toward distributing smaller operators into a wider ecosystem.
- •Manuel Hilty: 'If you're not aggressively transforming the way you work internally, you're probably dead in the water very soon' — drawing a distinction between internal AI adoption (urgent) and consumer-facing product adoption (still maturing).
- •Hilty argued agentic booking is technically possible today: 'I can take Claude, give it my credit card information, point it to Expedia, and say book an experience for me.' The limiting factor is consumer desire and workflow simplicity, not technical capability.
- •Arturo Moreno on commercial dynamics: 'In the end it's a new form of metasearch, right, with the same commercial dynamics — and if it's dominated by one or two players, those one or two players will want to make money out of it.' Commission friction may simply migrate to a cost-per-chat model.
Transcript
Next we will dive into AI. Yes. Uh we are going to talk about it a little bit more. Um but the the the session is govern is is is going to cover so much more than just AI. It's titled I think quite cleverly who owns the experience now agentic AI winners and losers. Uh let's see which category we all fall into. uh my wonderful friend and colleague uh Linda Fox who is executive editor at a very well-known focus wire. She will moderate for me today. Delighted to have her back here. Uh she is one of...
