Is GenAI Going to Take My Job in Travel? Not if You Do This.

This is a familiar question, but not the right one. If you’re nervous about job loss in the travel industry, the real questions should be:

• When might GenAI replace my job, and
• What can I do to improve my prospects in the interim?

Let’s break this down.

The Reality of GenAI and Your Travel Career

First is the question of whether GenAI is going to take your job, and the answer to that, if you are a knowledge worker in the travel sector, is almost certainly yes—but over time. Models are getting smarter month by month as their creators amp up their training, come up with clever ways to enhance their processing, and implement new training strategies to create reasoning models that can spend more time thinking about your question to give you a better answer. Models are also getting cheaper at the same time. WAY cheaper!

This confluence of rapidly increasing intelligence and rapidly declining cost create significant incentives for travel companies to see where they can reduce their costs by using GenAI models instead of more costly human resources. While this implies that eventually, as the models get smarter, they will be able to do all or nearly all of the tasks associated with just about any travel professional’s job, the key here is that today even the smartest models can’t do the entirety of most jobs, so for some period of time they will function as highly efficient assistants for humans. This has two immediate implications:

1. Travel companies will deploy GenAI assistants to make staff more efficient and, while models can’t replace all tasks in a job they will be able to do some of them—which means that for companies employing multiple people in a role, the total need for people will be less. For example, one company experimenting with using GenAI applications for customer service found that the model could handle 70% of the inquiries it received while maintaining NPS ratings equal to or higher than those of human agents. This allowed the company to return 70% of its service staff to the company they’d contracted them from; the net result was a projected $40 Million/yr savings. The model couldn’t handle everything, but it handled most inquiries and allowed the company to reallocate the remaining 30% of staff to the problems the model still couldn’t do. And it’s not just customer service that will be impacted. A recent WSJ article noted: “Silicon Valley is not immune to the shift. Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai recently said more than a quarter of the company’s new code is AI-generated.”
2. During the ‘assistant’ phase, the models can function as productivity enhancing co-pilots for the people who remain in their jobs. In other words, even for the tasks it can’t perform completely, it can help humans do those tasks better, saving time and reducing errors. This means that as long as GenAI can be used to perform any tasks in a job, it can reduce the need for humans to do those tasks—and as the models get smarter, the percentage of tasks they can do will increase, possibly to encompass all of them.

Which Travel Jobs Are Most Vulnerable?

In the travel industry specifically, we’re already seeing the impact. Several job functions are particularly susceptible to GenAI-driven automation:

• Customer Service and Support: Companies like Delta are already using virtual assistants to handle routine customer inquiries and trip bookings 24/7, reducing the need for human consultants.
• Travel Agents/Advisors: Especially offline agents who primarily provide information, quotes, and standard itinerary planning. As Booking Holdings’ CEO bluntly stated, AI trip planners (like Booking.com’s ChatGPT-based planner) can “eventually do everything a travel advisor can do – but better.”
• Content Creation & Marketing: Writing destination descriptions, blogs, or marketing copy is increasingly automated using GenAI, potentially reducing content writing teams.
• Itinerary Planning & Research: Research-heavy roles can be partly automated by GenAI, which quickly generates personalized travel plans from large datasets.
• Operational Roles: Positions in GDS companies or channel managers that involve manual data entry, standard fare management, or routine inventory updates may be automated by AI-driven systems.

When Will This Happen?

The pace of change in travel will depend on a company’s appetite for change and competitive pressures. According to an Amadeus survey, 51% of leaders said GenAI already has a “significant presence” in their country’s travel sector, and 36% expect it to within the next year. This suggests a potential tipping point in the next 1-2 years.

What’s more, the travel industry’s post-COVID labor shortages (with 7-11% of travel jobs unfilled in the US and EU) mean many companies are looking to AI to fill gaps instead of rehiring, effectively accelerating automation.

So to answer the question of when my job might be replaced, the answer is somewhere between today (as with the customer service agents above) and several years from now, depending on your specific job and how quickly the models learn to do the tasks in your job.

What Can You Do About It?

As for what to do about it in the interim, the answer is to make sure you’re in the group that your company selects to work with GenAI as a co-pilot and stay there as long as possible. The best way to do that is to embrace the AI Mindset (as I described in a previous post) as fully as possible to ensure your maximum productivity. Learning how to most effectively use GenAI is the best defense against being replaced by it.

But learning about GenAI isn’t just a defensive move, it also carries some advantages. One positive aspect for many travel professionals is that it lets you focus on the more complex aspects of your job, which many people find more rewarding. The model takes over your grunt work, letting you focus on where you can add unique value—like building genuine human connections with travelers, handling complex multi-destination itineraries with special requirements, or using emotional intelligence to solve customer problems.

A second benefit is, armed with your new knowledge of how models work, you’ll be far better able to see and understand the new kinds of jobs that GenAI creates in travel. It may take some time for these new jobs to surface, but when they do the best candidates will be those with greater GenAI proficiency.

The travel industry has always evolved with technology—from paper tickets to e-tickets, from travel agent dominance to OTA disruption. GenAI is just the next wave, and those who ride it rather than resist it will find themselves not just surviving, but thriving in this new world.