The old ritual of holiday planning is starting to look rather dated. Think twelve browser tabs, three comparison sites and a spreadsheet nobody wanted. Add the creeping fear that the “best fare” vanished while you made tea.

Now, large language models are taking over much of that work.

New Adobe Digital Insights data shows AI moving quickly into the heart of travel planning. In July 2026, traffic from AI sources to US travel websites rose 119% year-on-year. Since Adobe began tracking the channel in October 2024, that traffic has climbed a remarkable 1,822%.

That is no longer a novelty for the technology team. It is a commercial signal with flashing lights.

Adobe’s July survey of more than 5,000 US consumers also shows how people are using AI. Among AI-using travellers, 43% used it for research and another 43% for inspiration. Some 41% used it for transport planning, while 34% used it to build itineraries.

Most tellingly, 84% said AI improved their travel-planning experience.

The machines have moved well beyond finding a decent bowl of pasta. They are helping decide where people go, how they get there and, increasingly, which travel brands make the shortlist.

AI travellers are arriving ready to buy

The key finding for travel marketers may not be the traffic growth. It is what happens after the click.

In July, Adobe found AI-referred travel traffic converted just 1% below non-AI traffic. One year earlier, in July 2025, the conversion rate from AI sources had been 47% lower.

That gap has almost disappeared.

It suggests many travellers now reach a brand website after much of the hard work is done. They have already researched, compared and narrowed their choices inside an AI service.

Their behaviour after arrival is just as important. Adobe says AI-referred visitors had a 21% higher engagement rate than non-AI visitors. They stayed on travel websites 67% longer and were 42% less likely to bounce.

In plain English: these are not tyre-kickers.

Many arrive knowing what they want. They may already have asked an AI service to compare routes, rooms, amenities, offers or experiences. The website is becoming less of a research library and more of a final booking counter.

Adobe also found that 95% of surveyed AI users regarded AI responses as just as trustworthy as traditional search.

That matters in travel. A traveller may buy socks on impulse. A multi-thousand-dollar family holiday tends to encourage a little more homework.

The awkward problem: AI cannot read everything

Here comes the less comfortable part.

Adobe’s AI Content Visibility Checker found substantial machine-readability gaps across travel websites. Hotel homepages averaged a 71% visibility score. Cruise lines followed at 70%, while car-rental services reached 64%.

Airlines managed just 42%.

In practical terms, much of airline homepage content may therefore be difficult for large language models to access or understand.

Product pages performed better, but there was still plenty of room for improvement. Cruise lines averaged 76%, car rentals 73%, hotels 68% and airlines 59%.

There is a mild irony here. Travel brands have spent decades perfecting glossy photography, rich video and increasingly complex booking tools. Yet the next great travel shopper may be a machine that would prefer one clear sentence.

Great imagery still matters to people. But key details also need to exist in plain, readable text.

If fares, routes, room types, inclusions, cancellation rules, loyalty benefits or promotions sit only inside scripts, images or complex widgets, an AI assistant may miss them.

And if the machine cannot see the offer, it cannot confidently recommend it.

SEO now has a new travelling companion

This is where generative engine optimisation, or GEO, enters the travel marketing conversation.

Traditional SEO is not disappearing. Search engines will remain vital. But travel brands now have another audience: AI systems that retrieve, compare, summarise and cite information.

That changes the job.

Content must still be useful and appealing to people. It must also be clear, structured, current and easy for machines to read.

Adobe’s own LLM optimisation guidance points to practical fixes. These include clearer page structures and headings, concise summaries, structured FAQs and readable versions of important information held in multimedia. Adobe also identifies client-side rendering as a problem when important content fails to appear in the HTML that AI agents can access.

For travel brands, the priorities are straightforward:

• Put essential product facts in clear text, not only inside graphics, widgets or scripts.
• Use descriptive headings for fares, inclusions, amenities, routes, policies and common questions.
• Keep information current and consistent across websites, newsrooms and trusted third-party coverage.
• Track AI-referred traffic separately because its behaviour may differ from search, email and paid media.

None of that sounds terribly glamorous. Neither did fixing mobile websites fifteen years ago. The brands that moved early rarely regretted it.

A warning for Australian travel brands

Adobe’s latest figures are US-based. They should not be presented as a direct measure of Australian consumer behaviour.

But Australian airlines, hotels, cruise operators, tourism bodies, wholesalers and travel agencies would be unwise to ignore the direction of travel.

AI discovery crosses borders far more easily than most marketing plans do.

A traveller in Brisbane researching Japan may use the same AI platform as an American planning the Great Barrier Reef. A Singaporean looking at Tasmania may do exactly the same.

That makes machine readability an international sales issue.

The competitive question is also changing. It is no longer simply, “Do we rank on Google?”

Increasingly, the question is, “When someone asks an AI assistant for the best option, are we even in the answer?”

Adobe’s data suggests that deserves boardroom attention. It is not merely another task for the digital department.

Travel has always been a business built on being found, trusted and chosen. The technology may be new, but the commercial principle is comfortably old-fashioned.

If your customer’s new travel adviser is an algorithm, make sure it can read the brochure.

 

By: Octavia Koo – © 2026.

Read Time: 5 minutes.

 

Author Bio:

Octavia Koo arrived in Australia in the early eighties with little fuss and a good eye. Sydney suited her. At UNSW, she studied Arts, then found her footing in graphic design before drifting, quite naturally, into the digital side of things, building websites and shaping words that made people want to stay.

Singapore followed, and with it, the fast pace of tourism platforms and ITB Asia. Long before SEO became a buzzword, Octavia understood how stories travelled online. That’s where she met Stephen, and the seed for something more was planted.

A few years later, she joined Global Travel Media.

Today, Octavia works with quiet assurance, blending art, instinct and experience to produce stories that don’t shout; they simply work and linger.

 

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