The short answer
51% of Gen Z have already used tools such as ChatGPT to help plan a holiday — and 42% say they would trust AI for booking advice, according to Vision One Research’s Travel Brand Barometer 2026 (survey of 3,000 UK consumers, fieldwork June 2026, published 8 September 2026). Compare that with Baby Boomers: 9% have used AI to plan, and 22% would trust it near a purchase decision. The generational split is no longer about whether travelers use AI for travel — it is about how close to the booking each generation lets it get. For hotels, tour operators and DMCs, this changes what your website content has to do: it now has to convince a model making shortlists, not just a human scrolling pages.
The numbers, by generation
Vision One’s fieldwork (June 2026) shows a steep, consistent gradient across every AI use case it measured:
| AI use or trust | Gen Z | Millennials | Gen X | Baby Boomers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Has used AI (e.g. ChatGPT) to help plan a holiday | 51% | 43% | 23% | 9% |
| Would trust AI for booking advice | 42% | — | — | 22% |
| Would trust AI for restaurant recommendations | 42% | — | — | 32% |
| Would trust AI for flight selection | 27% | — | 17%* | 17% |
| Would trust AI to create an itinerary | 26% | — | 31% | 20% |
*Flight selection trust was reported as 27% Gen Z vs 17% Baby Boomers; itinerary trust peaks at 31% among Gen X. Source: Vision One Research, Travel Brand Barometer 2026, published 8 September 2026 (3,000 UK consumers, June 2026 fieldwork).
Two things stand out. First, the adoption gap between Gen Z and Boomers on planning is more than 5:1. Second — and more commercially important — the trust numbers cluster around decisions that end in money: which booking to make, which restaurant to choose, which flight to take. This is not travelers asking AI where it is sunny in March. This is AI shaping the shortlist that a wallet follows.
From inspiration to decisions: what actually changed
“Gen Z turns to AI for more than inspiration” is how Vision One framed it, and the details matter. Tony Lewis, Managing Director at Vision One Research, put it plainly:
“It’s solving much more complex holiday logistics. This might be matching plans and itineraries with transfers, budgets and further stops. Younger travellers are increasingly comfortable using AI for decisions closer to the point of purchase – from booking advice and restaurant recommendations to choosing flights.”
Read that against your own product. If you run a hotel, 42% of Gen Z travelers would happily let an AI assistant weigh in on whether your property is the right pick — and 42% would let it recommend your restaurant. If you run tours or you are a DMC assembling multi-stop programs, “matching itineraries with transfers, budgets and further stops” is literally your value proposition. The model is doing the assembling your sales team used to walk clients through.
The global backdrop reinforces the direction of travel: Skift Research’s State of Travel 2026 (fifth annual edition) finds 62% of global travelers are now familiar with AI trip-planning tools — familiarity that keeps converting into usage as each younger cohort enters the market with higher baseline trust.
The funnel has fragmented — and that is the real problem
The same Vision One research captures where Gen Z inspiration now starts: TikTok influences holiday decisions for 42% of Gen Z, ahead of Google at 37% and Instagram at 33%. For Baby Boomers, TikTok influences 3%. Meanwhile the booking itself still frequently lands on established platforms — 43% of Gen Z used Jet2holidays and 38% used Booking.com in the past 12 months.
So the journey for a 24-year-old planning a trip in 2026 looks like this: a video sparks the idea on TikTok, ChatGPT or Gemini turns it into a day-by-day plan with a shortlist of hotels, restaurants and tours, and the transaction lands on whatever platform — or direct site — the shortlist points to and the traveler trusts.
For travel brands this is genuinely new risk. In the old funnel you could win by ranking at the search stage. Now you must be present at three stages with three different kinds of content: discoverable in short-form video, credible and machine-citable when an AI tool is asked for a recommendation, and easy to transact with when the traveler moves to book. Drop any one stage and the traveler never reaches the next one — which is why Expedia Group/YouGov research (2026, 5,700+ adults in the US and UK) still finds only 8% of travelers overall rely on AI chatbots for planning while 59% use search engines: the averages hide a rapidly diverging young cohort. We broke down that trust gap and what it means for direct bookings in “The Travel AI Trust Gap: Why Travelers Plan with ChatGPT but Book Elsewhere”.
What this means for hotels
For hoteliers the Gen Z trust numbers translate into three concrete exposures:
1. Your room product gets compared by a model, not a page scanner. When 42% of Gen Z would trust AI booking advice, your property is being scored on extractable facts: location specifics, room categories, actual rates, cancellation terms, walkability, and how fresh any of that is. Vague brochure copy gives the model nothing to argue with — or worse, gives a competitor’s cleaner facts the win. That is exactly the failure mode we described in “Why ChatGPT Recommends Competing Hotels Over Yours”, and it is fixable: our AI visibility program for hotels starts from a prompt-level audit of which properties come up for your destination and why.
2. Your F&B just became a discovery channel. 42% of Gen Z would trust AI for restaurant recommendations — nearly matching booking advice. If your hotel has a serious restaurant, bar or rooftop, that outlet is now a top-of-funnel asset: travelers who never searched your hotel’s name may be recommended your dining room by an assistant, then discover you have rooms. Menu, cuisine, price band, hours and booking options need to exist as clean, structured, crawlable facts — not just an Instagram grid.
3. The OTA relationship gets repriced. Gen Z still books on OTAs (38% used Booking.com), but the shortlist that precedes the booking is increasingly drafted by AI. When the model can cite your direct rate, your direct booking terms and your reviews, you compete for the click on substance rather than OTA rank position — the argument we developed in depth in our piece on OTA commissions vs AI-era direct bookings. If your direct-site facts are weaker than your OTA listing, you have handed the model a reason to send the traveler somewhere that takes 15–25% of the revenue.
What this means for tour operators and DMCs
The itinerary number is your headline: 26% of Gen Z — and 31% of Gen X — would trust AI to create an itinerary, and Lewis’s “matching plans and itineraries with transfers, budgets and further stops” describes multi-day, multi-supplier logistics, exactly what operators and DMCs sell. Three implications:
- Publish your itineraries as structured, self-contained content. Day-by-day structure, explicit durations, difficulty levels, group sizes, inclusions, exclusions, price ranges and departure points. A model can only recommend an itinerary it can reconstruct. Our AI visibility program for tour operators exists precisely to rebuild operator content so assistants can quote it accurately.
- Answer the questions the model gets asked. “Best food tour in [city] for a group of six under €90”, “family-friendly 3-day itinerary without a car”, “which operator runs small-group sunset sailing”. If your pages never state these facts explicitly — in headings, tables and FAQ blocks — the model will synthesize an answer from whoever does, or from a Reddit thread.
- DMCs: your multi-stop expertise is now competing with a free assistant. The counter-move is depth: local logistics, permits, group rates, season windows and risk handling that generic AI output cannot fabricate. Presented as citable facts, that depth becomes the reason an assistant (or the agent using one) recommends you. Event and venue sourcing — where Cvent found 75% of planners already use AI — is the same pattern on the corporate side, as we covered in our piece on AI-assisted venue sourcing.
Why act before the 2027 booking season
Travel planning is seasonal: the decisions that fill your summer 2027 calendar are made in a booking window that opens months earlier — we mapped the timing in “Holiday Booking Windows: When AI Travel Planners Actually Choose Hotels”. Every month your content stays un-citable, another cohort of first-time AI planners cycles past you, and competitors’ facts accumulate in the sources models consult. And AI visibility compounds slowly: practitioners consistently report three to six months for a full GEO overhaul to show measurable results, because third-party mentions, review velocity and citations build incrementally (schema and on-page fixes land within days). Research from the original GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., ACM KDD 2024) found that content containing statistics and quantifiable claims earns 30–40% higher AI visibility than content without data points — one reason every operator page should state prices, durations and numbers explicitly rather than “from” and “various”.
The machine-citable checklist
If you do one pass before the 2027 window opens, make it this:
- State every commercial fact explicitly — rates, durations, group sizes, inclusions, cancellation terms, distances. No “from” prices without context, no “various options”.
- Structure itineraries day by day with headings a crawler can segment, and give each tour its own URL.
- Add FAQ blocks answering real prompt-shaped questions — “how much”, “how long”, “is it suitable for”, “what’s included”.
- Mark up with schema (TouristAttraction, TouristTrip, Product, FAQPage, LocalBusiness) so entities resolve cleanly.
- Keep dining, hours and rates fresh — stale facts get quietly down-weighted or replaced by OTA data.
- Measure which prompts you appear in, not just which keywords — the workflow we outline in our travel AI audit methodology.
If you would rather have this run as an ongoing program — audit, fixes, monitoring, and quarterly prompt benchmarking — that is what our travel GEO agency service does, and pricing is here.
FAQ
What percentage of Gen Z uses AI for travel planning? 51% of Gen Z have used AI tools such as ChatGPT to help plan a holiday, versus 43% of Millennials, 23% of Gen X and 9% of Baby Boomers (Vision One Research, Travel Brand Barometer 2026, published 8 September 2026; 3,000 UK consumers surveyed in June 2026).
Do Gen Z travelers actually book through AI? Not yet at scale — most transactions still complete on established platforms (38% of Gen Z used Booking.com in the past 12 months, 43% Jet2holidays). But 42% of Gen Z say they would trust AI for booking advice, meaning the shortlist that precedes the transaction is increasingly AI-drafted even when the booking itself lands elsewhere.
Should hotels invest in AI visibility now or wait? Now. Adoption among younger travelers is already majority behavior, visibility work takes three to six months to compound, and the 2027 booking window opens months before summer. Waiting means ceding the AI-drafted shortlist to competitors whose facts are easier to cite.
What content should tour operators publish to get recommended by AI? Structured, fact-dense itineraries: day-by-day breakdowns, explicit durations, prices, difficulty, group size, inclusions and exclusions, departure points, plus FAQ pages answering prompt-shaped questions. Content with statistics and quantifiable claims earns 30–40% higher AI visibility in GEO research (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).
How is GEO different from SEO for reaching Gen Z travelers? SEO wins rankings when humans search; GEO (generative engine optimization) makes your facts citable when an AI assistant synthesizes an answer. Gen Z’s path runs TikTok → AI planning → booking, so you need short-form discoverability and machine-citable facts — the two work on different content and different signals.
The bottom line
The question Tony Lewis poses — “whether the brand is present and relevant throughout that journey” — is now an operational one. Gen Z already plans with AI, already trusts it with booking advice and restaurant picks, and already starts the journey on TikTok before any search box. Hotels and operators that publish clean, structured, fact-rich content will be in the answer; the rest will be in the OTA bill. If you want to know which side you are on, a travel AI audit will tell you in a week.