AI Isn’t Your Differentiator. Your Business Is.

Ask most travel businesses what they’re doing about AI and you’ll hear similar answers: a chatbot on the website, content generation in the marketing team, a pilot somewhere in customer service, a working group looking at agentic AI. All of it sensible. Almost none of it a competitive advantage.

The reason is straightforward. Nearly everybody else is doing the same things, with the same models, at the same time.

HBX Group’s intelligence report in May found that 65% of professionals across B2B travel distribution are now using AI in some form, and 64% say it’s already having a positive effect on their daily work. Look at where it’s being used, though, and the picture narrows sharply: mostly content creation and customer interactions, mostly pilots rather than operations. Their chief strategy, transformation and AI officer summarised it in a single line. “This is no longer about access to AI.”

That line matters more than the adoption figure. If access is no longer the constraint, access can no longer be the advantage.

After working with over 70 travel brands across three decades, this is the pattern we consistently see at Inspiretec when a technology moves from novel to normal. The businesses that gain from it aren’t the ones that adopt it first. They’re the ones that already knew what they were uniquely good at, and used the technology to do more of it.

Which is why we’d gently suggest that a lot of travel businesses are asking the wrong question. They’re asking, “How can we use AI?” The more valuable question is, “What makes our business genuinely different, and how can AI make that difference greater?”

Travel has been here before

When the internet arrived, having a website was a differentiator. Then having e-commerce was. Then transacting online, personalising content, automating marketing, giving customers what they needed at two in the morning.

Today nobody describes a website or a booking engine as a competitive advantage. They’re the cost of entry. The internet didn’t stop being transformational. It became normal.

There’s a fair objection to that comparison: the internet did produce durable winners, and they won by being better at the internet than everybody else. Booking and Expedia are not footnotes.

But look at what those businesses actually did. They didn’t bolt the internet onto an existing travel company. They rebuilt the company around it: the economics, the structure, the incentives, and above all the data. The advantage was never possession of the technology. It was the willingness to reorganise around it while competitors were still treating it as another channel.

The technology isn’t the advantage. What you do with it is.

Picture two tour operators of similar size. Both have access to the same models. Both can generate content, automate service, analyse data, stand up an AI sales assistant. Put their technology side by side and there’s very little between them.

But one of them has spent thirty years building destination knowledge. It has supplier relationships in Sri Lanka and northern Vietnam that a competitor couldn’t replicate inside two years.

Its consultants understand a particular kind of traveller: the £9,000-a-trip tailormade customer who wants the itinerary to feel curated rather than assembled. It has a trusted brand, a product that’s genuinely different, and customer data that’s rich because it sees the whole journey from first enquiry through to the welcome-home call.

That’s the advantage, and AI doesn’t replace any of it. It scales it.

The destination knowledge that currently sits in the heads of a handful of colleagues becomes available to the full team, and to the customer browsing at midnight. Twenty years of booking history stops producing better reports and starts producing better recommendations. A specialist operator begins to behave with the reach of a business several times its size, without losing the thing that made it worth choosing in the first place.

AI amplifies whatever you point it at

Including, unavoidably, the things you’d rather it didn’t.

We made this point in a slightly different context when we wrote about CRM as the foundation of customer experience, and it holds even more firmly here. A capable model sitting on top of fragmented customer data doesn’t produce personalised outcomes. It produces generic ones, delivered fluently and at speed, which is worse than doing nothing at all in a category where customers can spot inauthenticity a mile off. Automate a process that was already broken and you simply break it faster.

The HBX findings point in exactly this direction. The barriers to scaling beyond pilots weren’t cost or capability:

None of those are AI problems. They’re operating-model and data problems that AI has made visible.

The work, in other words, isn’t buying AI. It’s becoming the kind of business AI can usefully be pointed at.

Start with your advantage, not your AI strategy

For travel CEOs and commercial leaders, the first question isn’t “where can we put AI?” It’s “where are we already better than our competitors?” And then: “what would happen if we could do ten times more of that?”

Those are considerably more interesting questions than which tool to buy.

The real risk is sameness

Everybody is drawing on the same underlying models. Everybody is generating broadly similar content, launching a chatbot, talking about agents. There’s a genuine possibility that a technology sold as a source of competitive advantage ends up making an entire industry look more alike than it did before.

The answer isn’t to hold back. It’s to use AI to become more distinctive rather than less: your brand, your knowledge, your product, your people, your customer relationships, your data, your particular way of selling travel. Those are the things a competitor cannot acquire by signing up to the same platform.

AI is the accelerator. Your differentiation is the vehicle.

Is your advantage ready to be amplified?

In five years we doubt anyone will describe a travel company as “AI-powered,” any more than we’d call one “internet-enabled” today. It will simply be how the industry works. The businesses that come out ahead will be the ones that used this window to rethink how they operate, and then used AI to push their existing advantages further out of reach.

That’s a data and operating-model question before it’s a technology question. It’s where most of our work with travel businesses actually sits: getting the customer view complete and reliable enough that AI amplifies your advantage rather than your mess.

From high-volume retail operations to specialist tailormade operators, the businesses that get this sequence right consistently end up with the same thing: technology that makes them more like themselves, not more like everyone else.

So perhaps the question isn’t how do we adopt AI. Perhaps it’s: what makes us special, and how do we make that impossible to catch?