Agentic commerce seems to be an up and coming topic for aviation. It has generated presentations at events and chatter on social media.
Imagine an empty box with a blinking cursor on your screen asking you where you want to go or what you want to do. One user will ask for cheap beers in Spain, another for smart art museums in Italy. The AI will then put together a package.
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The opportunity for airlines could be great. They already publish their schedules and fares so robot agents have data to go on. Travel journalism, blogs and bulletin boards have produced large amounts of respectable third-party comment about service and reliability, which the AI can learn from.
In this article I am going to write about four challenges that airlines are going to face with agentic commerce.
Statista, a research outfit, state that 37% of consumers in the UK book their flights online. Meanwhile out east online exposure is smaller – 20% of Chinese consumers book package holidays using the web.
It seems unlikely that agentic commerce will shoot to the top of the market share among distribution channels. But the potential for customers to shift from their tried and tested websites and apps to AI agents is significant. There could be a lot of revenue on the table for airlines.
However Chris Staab, an industry veteran, reckons that airlines are set up to lose a significant proportion of the opportunity. He points out that Online Travel Agents (OTA) take nearly half of online bookings. British parking provider Airport Parking and Hotels conducted research showing that OTA have a 48% of air and hotel e-commerce bookings.
Some airlines got a head start in the online booking market. London-based british-airways.com went live on Christmas Even 95. Meanwhile Expedia and Lastminute.com appeared in 96 and 98 respectively.
But other airlines were late to the party. Qatar Airways only started accepting bookings using their own website in 2007. A third-party flyqatar dot com, which now links to qatarairways dot com, offered pre-2007 bookings on the gas-rich entrepot’s flights when I first started my business travel career.
Mr Staab thinks that airlines had a great opportunity with online sales in the nineties and noughties, but lost out because they were too slow and hard for third-parties to work with.
He believes that the same might happen again, this time with agentic commerce. In his words, agentic commerce may be “OTA 2.0” for airlines. That is, while airlines wait and see, faster and nimbler companies will hoover up the opportunity.
At Air Travel Payments Summit in London last month the chatter included remarks, sadly unattributable, that may not augur well for agentic commerce and aviation. It seems that some agentic commerce companies founded specifically to serve airlines are signing up other types of business first. Think hotels and credit card companies.
Airlines are probably going to miss the boat with agentic commerce. It may already be too late for them to achieve good-value solutions.
There are three other issues for airline agentic commerce specialists to grapple with.
First up is that AI providers may decide to divert their computing power to the most lucrative opportunities for their business. Which is unlikely to be travel.
