At the recent 2026 TravelDaily Conference, Fliggy CTO Ye Chen shared his views in a presentation titled “Agentic Commerce and AI-native travel: How far have we come?”
In his view, as agents begin to search, compare, make decisions and even complete transactions on behalf of travelers, the travel industry’s traditional traffic gateways, transaction models and operating models will also change.
For the hotel industry, a more immediate question is emerging:
As travelers increasingly rely on AI instead of searching on their own, how will hotels get discovered?
Traditional search assumes that users have a fairly clear idea of what they are looking for. But many travel needs are difficult to capture with just a few keywords.
This is precisely where AI agents are changing the process. Instead of entering fragmented search terms, travelers can describe their needs in natural language. AI can then break those needs down into destinations, dates, budgets, preferences and itineraries, and call on different services, including hotels, flights, transportation and travel experiences, to turn “where I want to go” into an executable travel plan.
Fliggy has already embedded AI capabilities into the travel experience. Its AI-native application, “Fliggy Bangbang,” covers the journey from travel inspiration and itinerary planning to booking and post-trip services. Users can even give the AI a travel itinerary or recommendation post from a social media platform and ask it to turn the content into a personalized travel plan that can actually be booked and executed.
OTAs have traditionally focused on “giving you more choices.” AI, on the other hand, could be about “making those choices for you.”
But why would AI recommend your hotel to a traveler?
The answer goes beyond traffic. The accuracy of real-time inventory, pricing flexibility, completeness of product information, clarity of cancellation policies, and whether service capabilities can be identified and accessed by AI could all become factors in the agent’s decision-making process.
The impact of AI may also go beyond simply diverting traffic away from OTAs. Chen believes AI could generate new travel demand: long-tail needs that previously went unsearched or were too difficult to articulate could enter the transaction market as AI lowers the cost of travel decision-making.
Search is not disappearing. The demand behind it could actually grow.
For hotels, this may be more important than simply asking whether the “traffic gateway has changed.”
