A Traveler Is Not a Search Query

“We’re thinking Italy, maybe Spain too. The kids are 8 and 10. My mother might join us in Rome, but not Barcelona. She’ll need her own room and can’t do too many stairs. We don’t need luxury everywhere, but I’d rather spend more on location.”

This is how people actually talk about travel.

Eventually, somehow, all of that needs to become destinations, dates, occupancy, rooms, filters, availability and price. But a traveler is not a search query. Somewhere in that translation, a lot of meaning gets lost.

Travel technology has spent decades getting incredibly good at the other side of this equation. More inventory, faster search, better connectivity, better filters, dynamic pricing. And it works. We built an entire travel tech industry capable of searching millions of flight and hotel combinations in seconds.

But before any of that can happen, somebody still needs to translate what the traveler actually means into something those booking engines understand. For a long time that somebody has been the travel advisor, the call center agent, the salesperson, or mostly just the traveler themselves, clicking through dozens of drop-down filters trying to explain what they meant.

And maybe that’s the interesting part now.

For most of travel technology’s history, losing some of that context was a necessary compromise. I’m not sure it is anymore. AI and natural language models can understand intent in ways that simply weren’t practical a few years ago. Context can actually persist.

A system can finally understand that “my mother is joining us” isn’t just a simple +1 guest count. It changes room configurations, accessibility needs, hotel location, budget, and even decisions that were already locked in. The traveler didn’t start a new search. The trip changed.

This is where I think the conversation around AI in travel gets way more interesting than just slapping a chatbot on a website or tweaking a search box. What if we stop forcing the traveler to become a database query quite so early? What if we can preserve the why—the tradeoffs, the family relationships, the things that are flexible and the things that absolutely are not—and carry that context all the way through to the actual inventory and transaction?

I’ve spent most of my career on the commerce side of travel, thinking about inventory, distribution, sourcing and what we can sell. Building Intentra has made me spend a lot more time thinking about the question before that: what should we sell this traveler, and why?

I don’t think the future of travel tech is about blowing up everything we built. A lot of the infrastructure works really damn well. But there is clearly an intelligence layer missing between how travelers actually think and how travel commerce operates.

And for the first time, we actually have the technology to build it.