Agentic AI Revolutionizes Travel: Google, Sabre, and Hopper Lead the Shift from Search to Book

Published on December 4, 2025

For the past few years, the travel industry has been enamored with Generative AI. We’ve all seen the dazzling itineraries created by ChatGPT or the poetic destination descriptions drafted by Gemini. But for all its creativity, Generative AI has had one major flaw: it could talk the talk, but it couldn’t walk the walk. It could suggest a hotel, but it couldn’t book it. It could find a flight, but it couldn’t swipe the credit card.

That is about to change. As we move through late 2025 and into 2026, the buzzword on every travel executive’s lips is no longer “Generative.” It is “Agentic.”

According to recent reports and industry moves highlighted by Travel Weekly, Agentic AI for travel is officially heating up. This new breed of technology promises to shift the paradigm from “search and plan” to “decide and do,” marking one of the most significant technological leaps in the history of hospitality.

What is Agentic AI?

To understand the hype, we must first understand the distinction.

• Generative AI is a creator. It generates text, images, and ideas based on prompts. It is passive.
• Agentic AI is a doer. It is an autonomous system capable of reasoning, planning, and—crucially—taking action to achieve a goal.

In the travel context, an Agentic AI doesn’t just tell you that the 5:00 PM flight to London is available. It notices that your usual 2:00 PM meeting ran late, checks your calendar, realizes you’ll miss your connection, finds the 5:00 PM alternative, books it using your stored payment details, and sends the new boarding pass to your phone—all while you are still in the meeting.

The Giants Enter the Arena: Google’s Power Play

The signal that Agentic AI has moved from niche experiment to mainstream reality came with a roar from Mountain View. Google is actively prepping agentic booking tools for its “AI Mode” in Search.

Google is currently working closely with major partners—including Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, IHG, and Choice Hotels—to build capabilities that allow users to book flights and hotels directly through the AI interface. The goal is no longer just to be the search engine that sends you elsewhere; the goal is to be the agent that completes the transaction.

Julie Farago, Google’s VP of engineering for travel, has described this as a “North Star” for the company: saving travelers time and increasing booking confidence. While there is no firm timeline for a global rollout, the implication is clear. When the world’s largest search engine becomes a booking agent, the entire landscape changes.

Hopper and Sabre: The Early Adopters

While Google lays the groundwork for mass adoption, other travel tech leaders are already demonstrating what Agentic AI looks like in the wild.

Hopper, the app known for its price-prediction algorithms, has unveiled “Assist,” a tool that demonstrates the raw power of agentic capabilities. In recent demos, Hopper executives showed how the AI could handle complex, multi-step disruptions—like extending a stay in London and renting a car after a missed connection—simply through a voice conversation. The AI didn’t just provide links; it modified the itinerary in real-time.

Meanwhile, Sabre, a backbone of the global travel industry, is empowering agencies with its Mosaic retailing platform. This technology allows travel management companies to deploy their own AI agents that can perform independent tasks, such as rebooking flights or processing payments, without human intervention. This is critical for corporate travel, where speed is currency.

The McKinsey Report: A Roadmap for Disruption

The shift is further validated by a heavyweight report titled “Remapping Travel with Agentic AI,” published by McKinsey & Company in partnership with Skift. The report suggests that we are on the brink of a rapid adoption curve, potentially faster than the shift to online search engines a generation ago.

The report highlights a key friction point: Trust. Currently, travelers are hesitant to hand over their credit cards to a bot. However, as these agents prove their competence—successfully rebooking a cancelled flight while the human traveler is still sleeping—that trust will earn itself. The report predicts that “mature versions” of these tools will be commonplace within two years.

Friend or Foe? The Impact on Human Agents

The rise of Agentic AI inevitably brings up the question: Is this the end of the human travel advisor?

The consensus among experts is a cautious “no.” Instead of replacement, we are looking at a bifurcation of the market.

• The Transactional Layer: Simple point-to-point bookings, rebookings, and standard inquiries will be almost entirely automated. Agentic AI will handle the “drudgery” of the job—the hours spent on hold with airlines or navigating clunky booking screens.
• The Consultative Layer: This clears the deck for human advisors to focus on high-touch, complex, and emotional travel planning. An AI can book a room, but it can’t necessarily empathize with a nervous bride or use personal influence to get a VIP upgrade.

Corporate travel tools like SkyLink are already bridging this gap, using agentic AI to steer business travelers toward policy-compliant options while mimicking a “human consultative experience.”

The Outlook for 2026

As we look toward 2026, the “heat” in Agentic AI will come from the competition to own the customer interface. Will travelers trust Google’s AI to manage their entire trip? Will they rely on an airline’s proprietary agent? Or will they subscribe to a “super-agent” app like Hopper?

One thing is certain: the era of clicking through twenty open tabs to plan a vacation is coming to an end. The agents are coming, and they are ready to get to work.