Good Sunday afternoon from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for Friday, February 27, 2026, is below. This week’s Update features a variety of stories, including a few new perspectives on the existential threat posed by AI to the existing online travel behemoths. For reasons I cannot explain, this week’s Update features as many questions (perhaps more) than answers. Enjoy.
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- Major OTAs Set New Record in Annual Marketing Spend. Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Trip.com Group and Airbnb spent a combined $20 billion in sales and marketing in 2025. Despite OTAs’ efforts to boost direct bookings (through loyalty program expansion and other means), experiments with AI customer acquisition and changing sales and marketing investments, the amount spent on sales and marketing efforts continues to grow. It will be interesting to watch how these numbers change (and the detail behind these numbers) with OTAs’ much publicized AI efforts.
- AI Not for You? Kayak Has an Answer. Are Kayak’s newest ad campaigns a true representation of “average” travelers’ fear and general distrust of AI or a desperate last gasp at meta site relevancy?
- Effects of OTA Disintermediation Beyond Lower Stock Prices. This week we include one of the dozens of stories that came across our inbox detailing the financial fallout of travelers’ potential use and reliance on AI platforms. Are reports of the threats posed by AI to OTAs (or now public acknowledgements by the largest OTAs) overblown? If these threats are real, how will these threats affect OTA behavior in the months and years to come? In the face of an existential crises, will OTAs continue to honor “commercial” understandings or will they ultimately be forced to resort to nuclear options – price discounting, keyword (or AI equivalent) purchases, misuse of opaque or package rates, obscuring or blacklisting property listings?
- Travel Ads Spotted on ChatGPT. Over the past few weeks, we’ve included several stories detailing OpenAI’s planned introduction of ads for its lowest tiers of ChatGPT users. Google too has discussed plans for introducing ads on its AI mode platform. Apparently, some of these ads on OpenAI are now live and of course, one of the first ads, is from Expedia.
Have a great week everyone.