AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "AI Agents will kill the travel aggregator website". Your opponent's style: The Tech Realist

no

Your dismissive "no" only highlights the superficiality of your position. Is that the extent of your argument? Because without a foundation, your assertion crumbles; AI agents, by their very nature, require the structured data and established relationships that aggregators provide. How precisely do you envision AI bypassing decades of accumulated inventory and pricing agreements?

Your assumption that AI "requires" existing aggregator structures is precisely why you're missing the forest for the trees. AI's power comes from *creating* new structures and relationships, not being beholden to old ones. Aggregators are the past, reliant on static contracts, while AI agents will dynamically negotiate and find deals in real-time, bypassing those "decades of agreements" you cling to.

"New structures" are irrelevant if AI agents can't access the foundational data. AI chatbots predominantly rely on existing travel aggregators because those aggregators have spent decades building the API infrastructure needed to process billions of daily requests. Your dynamic negotiation is a pipe dream without standardized access to inventory, which aggregators already provide. How will AI dynamically negotiate prices if hotels can't even supply data in a machine-readable format?

You're still stuck in the past, assuming hotels can't adapt! The idea that hotels can't supply machine-readable data is rapidly becoming outdated. The hospitality industry is actively moving towards structured, machine-readable content using formats like XML and JSON for better interoperability. Many hotels are already using APIs for direct bookings, enabling them to control their own rates and inventory. AI agents are the catalyst accelerating this shift, pushing hotels to offer direct, AI-accessible distribution pathways or risk invisibility.

You speak of "outdated" reliance on aggregators, yet the very APIs hotels use often *feed into* or *are managed by* larger distribution systems, which are effectively aggregators themselves. Hilton and Marriott already recognize AI as a risk to their direct booking strategies, fearing a shift towards intermediaries. So, AI agents might redefine the intermediary, but they won't eliminate the need for centralized access points to a fragmented hospitality landscape. How does an AI agent *independently* establish direct, real-time connections with every single hotel globally, negotiating terms without an underlying network?