AI trip planners are the future: let's build them a moat

AI trip planners are the future of travel. This is the bet everyone should be making. Users are already flocking to these products to plan, compare, and dream about their next trip. The experience is genuinely better than anything that came before. These are awesome platforms.

But the business is fragile. AI trip planners are not defensible companies today. They’re fighting two huge incumbents at the same time, and both of those incumbents are bigger, better funded, and have more data.

Trip planners compete with Google

Google owns the top of the funnel for hotel search and comparison. They have decades of structured travel data, real reviews, photos, prices from every supplier, and Gemini sitting right on top of all of it. The moment Google ships a serious AI trip planner (they will), they have everything they need to win (and they will).

Trip planners compete with the OTAs

The big OTAs sit on the inventory side. They have the supply, the brand, and the trust that comes from billions of bookings. They can and will build their own AI trip planner on top of all of it. No startup is going to out-brand them on travel.

The current business is fragile

AI trip planners today usually make money on referrals and kickbacks from OTAs. That works while Google and the OTAs are still catching up. It stops working the day either of them ships their own planner. The current UX is also easy to replicate. Intelligence is a commodity. A nicer chat box is not a moat.

The real moat

The moat is deep partnerships and infra integrations. Stuff that takes years to build, can’t be cloned over a weekend, and gets stronger the more of it you have. Everything else is surface UX.

That means a direct channel to hotels. Unpublished rates and real upgrades. Infrastructure that can handle agentic search loads. Agentic checkout that can book a whole multi-leg trip in one go instead of one form at a time. Owning part of the customer relationship instead of renting it from an OTA. Moving from glorified search and memory tools to real portals that build personalized, reliable trips at the best price.

This is hard, slow, tar-pit work. That’s the point. That’s what strait is building.