4 scenarios for flight booking in the age of agentic AI. Airlines are still at the early stages of agentic artificial intelligence (AI). At the Elevate conference in Atlanta, ATPCO revealed that 37% of carriers have active AI programs but only 11% of airlines have deployed agentic AI. United and Malaysia Airlines are two carriers that have adopted agentic. In early September, United Airlines added agentic disruption management to its app, automatically rebooking passengers if their flight is canceled and putting them on standby for up to three earlier flights. If the seat becomes available, passengers can choose to switch to the earlier flight. Malaysia Airlines launched its Mavis AI assistant in early 2026, based on Ada's agentic customer experience model. In addition to handling natural language queries, Mavis can handle even complex passenger requests, handing off to human agents only where necessary. While airlines are dipping their toes in agentic AI, its use for bookings seems further away, even as Phocuswright research shows more travelers are open to letting AI book for them. One reason for airlines' slow reaction is a lack of clarity surrounding whether travelers will embrace end-to-end agentic bookings and, if they do, whether airlines will be the ones to carry out these bookings rather than online travel agencies (OTAs) and other intermediaries. Research firm TNMT, part of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, is trying to kickstart the process by setting out its vision in a report, How agentic AI could reshape flight booking in the 2030s, which is intended to help airlines prepare. The report draws on trends in technology, regulation, consumer behavior, geopolitics and airline distribution and envisages four possible futures. Scenario No. 1: AI search but no agentic booking. AI-powered search in travel is soaring, but the TMNT report outlines a future in which consumers refuse to hand over the final booking decision to an autonomous agent. If this pans out, airlines will need to remain focused on direct channels such as airline.com and mobile apps, while fares, seat maps, ancillaries and loyalty benefits are only partially accessible in a format AI agents can reliably use. Indirect sales overtake direct bookings, and look-to-book ratios soar as a result. Richard Edwards of airline strategy consultancy Revidio said that even the definition of an agentic booking is unclear - is it truly an end-to-end process including payment or just up to the point where the user has to agree and choose a payment method? "No sensible person is going to give up their own financial controls 100%," he said. "In a corporation, you also have a chain of approvals. Even if you've given the agentic agent the authorization to go ahead and pay, I would expect to still be given the option to say I agree with that or not." John Morhous, chief experience officer for Flight Centre Travel Group's corporate brands said, "The reality is that in B2B, the company ultimately pays, so I don't see things evolving to a place where that full decision-making authority is handed over - the human is accountable, not the agent." Scenario No. 2: Europe loses access to the best AI models. The report's second scenario envisages a world where Europe is cut off from the world's leading foreign AI models, such as when the U.S. government recently ordered Anthropic to restrict Fable and Mythos. In this scenario, European airlines might try to respond by securing long-term access to European computing infrastructure and building a shared, airline-controlled offer layer. Ann Cederhall, co-founder of airline distribution consultancy LeapShift, is not sure this will happen. "Kudos if you want to do this kind of European effort, but where's the money? It's going to take 20 years just in Germany," she said. Revidio's Edwards thinks the International Air Transport Association (IATA) would have a logical role in such a plan but it has already shown that standardization, such as in the case of New Distribution Capability (NDC), takes a very long time and risks intentional delay tactics by certain stakeholders. "There are certain participants whose business is likely to suffer as a consequence of NDC. Some of the guys that participate in standard setting are just in there trying to create longevity for their business model." Scenario no. 3: Airlines are shut out. A third scenario from the report sees travelers starting to trust AI agents to make decisions and complete bookings on their behalf. However, in this potential future, airlines fail to secure the customer context and transaction layer because they remain relatively invisible within AI at the expense of indirect channels such as OTAs. Flight Centre's Morhous believes airlines will not take full control with agentic and that the winners will be those players who hold "the most complete, policy-aware version of the offer." "Our approach is to own both the agent and the plumbing - that is why we built our own AI platform, and AI agents on top (Sam, Mel), and are enabling access to them via MCP. That lets the traveler use an auditable and permissioned way to ask for something, instead of an airline's myopic options," he said. Revidio's Edwards said OTAs already have first mover advantage in agentic AI. "[OTAs] have seen that an opportunity to disintermediate again and to compete against those airline direct sites. They have direct connections into the hearts of many travel businesses - airline, hotel, car and rail. They see themselves as being in a very, very good position to quickly plant their feet in this new territory." While airlines have been slow to react, he does think they will recognize the danger posed by agentic AI, but this may take three or four years. Scenario no. 4: airlines embrace agentic. In the final scenario, airlines have recognized that travelers want to book agentically and have trust in AI agents. They also choose to make their full offer visible, understandable and bookable inside those agentic environments. Gaurav Roy, CTO of airline software provider Accelya, said, "The strategic question for airlines is whether they want to participate as intelligent retailers or they are just an inventory provider in this whole ecosystem." Roy believes airlines will be forced to up their data and systems whether they want to or not. "Others are going to sweep them anyway. If airlines don't expose their data to AI, AI either hallucinates or barrages them to get some information out of them," he said. He added, "Airlines certainly want to own the context and getting information about the purpose of travel saves a lot of infrastructure cost at the airline because you're not putting irrelevant offers out there." Which scenario will win out? TNMT points out in its report that the goal was not to predict one definitive future but rather to "explore what each could mean for airline distribution, customer relationships and commercial strategy." LeapShift's Ann Cederhall predicts that One ID, IATA's digital identity initiative, will help agentic AI grow in airlines. "I believe that I should own this [identity and payment] data and this can be controlled by my own AI agent in a beautiful way. I don't see an agentic AI agent being really any different from a travel agent, except that it's going to be much more efficient." Accelya's Roy said trust will be key to travelers adopting agentic and airlines being forced to follow. "The journey of trust, for some people, takes a few weeks; for some people, it takes a few years."

How Enriched Bundles are transforming airline merchandising for corporate travel. ATPCO's Enriched Bundles solution can finally be distributed and merchandised for the airline industry at scale. Learn how it works and how to get involved. Senior Manager, Product Management 25 July 2026 Key takeaways * Corporate travelers have diverse needs, making one-size-fits-all travel policies increasingly ineffective. * ATPCO's Enriched Bundles solution helps airlines personalize offers while supporting smarter, policy-compliant corporate bookings. * Standardized bundle content enables travel channels to compare offers consistently and scale modern airline retailing. Corporate travel has always been more complicated than it looks. From the outside, it seems simple: book the cheapest compliant fare, get the traveler there and back, repeat. But anyone who has spent time with a travel program, whether designing one, managing one, or living inside one as a "road warrior," knows the reality is far messier. The Monday-to-Thursday road warrior with a carry-on bag and a tight connection is not the same traveler as the conference attendee checking two bags and a product sample. The senior executive on a long-haul route is not the same as the field consultant making three short-haul hops a week. Yet, for years, corporate travel policy has treated them as if they were - routing every booking to the lowest logical fare and leaving individual needs to be sorted out at the gate, if they are at all. Airlines have known this is a problem for a long time. The challenge has been acting on it. More specifically, it's been getting the right offer to the right traveler through the right channel, in a format that travel managers can actually evaluate against policy. What one enriched bundle taught American Airlines about its own customers. Sometimes, the most revealing moments in modern airline retailing are the unintended ones. When American Airlines introduced Main Plus, a bundle combining a main cabin seat, extra legroom, and a checked bag, the product was designed with leisure travelers in mind. Longer flights, families, travelers who check bags: a clean, straightforward offer for a predictable set of needs. But what happened next surprised the team. Corporate customers started buying Main Plus, not because they were confused about the offer, but because it resonated with their needs. Conferences mean checked bags. Longer routes mean legroom matters. Economy Plus seating, bundled rather than sold as a standalone ancillary, provided a streamlined way to stay in policy even better than a line-item add-on. As Marcial Lapp, Vice President of Revenue Engineering at American Airlines, put it, "The lesson wasn't that the bundle failed. It was that it revealed micro-segments within the corporate base that American hadn't fully mapped. Road warriors are one type of corporate traveler. But there are plenty of others, with different trip purposes, different needs, and critically different willingness to pay for the right combination of services." Bundling is supposed to surface demand that was always there but couldn't be captured because the offer wasn't structured to find it. The challenge is doing it systematically, at scale, across the channels where corporate travelers actually book. The policy problem and why enriched bundles are the solution. For corporate travel managers, the standard toolkit has always been blunt. Book the lowest logical fare. Cap the spend. Approve or deny. It's a framework built for a world of undifferentiated fares, and it creates a predictable outcome: travelers who feel like the policy is working against them rather than for them. Enriched bundles change this, but only if channels can see the offers clearly enough to evaluate them. Judy Yu, Director of Global Travel Partnerships at SAP Concur, frames it like this: A well-constructed bundle removes the friction of comparison-shopping six add-ons the night before an early morning flight. Instead of a traveler piecing together flexibility, legroom, and Wi-Fi as separate line items (each requiring its own policy check), the bundle presents a coherent, pre-evaluated offer. The policy can evolve from "book the cheapest fare" to something more like "you're approved for the flexibility bundle on routes over four hours." Nuanced. Employee-friendly. And still cost-controlled. But this all only works if the channel - the online booking tool, travel management company, or global distribution system - can receive the bundle in a structured, comparable format. If every airline's bundle arrives differently, with inconsistent naming, missing attributes, and no visual context, the travel manager can't write a policy rule against it, and the traveler can't make an informed choice. This is an infrastructure problem, not a content problem. The infrastructure gap and how ATPCO's Enriched Bundles are closing it. Enriched Bundles have been so hard to scale because of three-part structural gaps: * No airline industry standard for how bundles are defined * Limited NDC schema support for distributing them consistently * No standardized merchandising layer for channels to present bundle content clearly to shoppers ATPCO's Enriched Bundles solution addresses all three gaps. Its Product Catalog solution provides a consistent structure for bundle data. Even if the bundle originates in an external offer order management system, ATPCO's Product Catalog solution ensures a common language so bundles are shared in a format the distribution chain can actually use at scale. Routehappy enrichment then adds the merchandising layer: clear bundle names, targeted images, icons, and structured attribute details delivered via API across all channels, NDC and indirect alike. The result is what Judy Yu described as genuinely transformative for the channel side. Instead of building custom logic for each airline's unique bundle structure, a channel can consume enriched bundle content through a single, consistent API (likely the same Routehappy integration many already have in place). Travel managers can write real policy rules. Travelers can compare bundles across airlines in a way that actually makes sense. This solution is currently being validated through an active proof of concept, which is a collaboration that spans the full airline industry ecosystem, from airline to booking system to corporate channel. Early results will inform how the solution scales across the industry. What scaling enriched bundles mean for airlines, channels, and corporate travel programs. For airlines, the opportunity is clearer micro segmentation. There are many corporate segments, each with distinct trip purposes, preferences, and willingness to pay. Enriched bundles are the mechanism to act on that knowledge at scale, not just on the direct channel, but across every indirect touchpoint where corporate travelers book. For channels and travel managers, the opportunity is smarter policy design. They can move from blunt spend caps to nuanced, employee-friendly frameworks that reflect what travelers actually need. This gives travelers the transparency to make confident decisions quickly. For corporate travelers, the opportunity is simpler but just as significant because there is no more piecing together six add-ons the night before an early morning flight. A bundle that already accounts for your trip purpose, preferences, and company's policy can be presented clearly, comparably, and in the tool you're already using to book. For all three, the infrastructure is now in place. The question is how quickly the airline industry wants to move forward together. See ATPCO's Enriched Bundles solution in action. On 28 July, ATPCO is hosting a live webinar, Bringing Enriched Bundles to life, where ATPCO'll help you understand exactly how the solution works, show real-world examples, and share what ATPCO has learned from the active POC. If your airline or channel is interested in being part of the next proof of concept, start here.