Hilton Tech Exec Says AI Agents Put OTAs ‘Under Real Threat’

Photo Credit: Hilton CIO Michael Leidinger, right, talking with Greg Land in Global Industry Leader – Hospitality · Amazon Web Services (AWS) Skift Hilton's top technology executive thinks AI assistants are doing what years of ad campaigns couldn't: loosening online travel agencies' hold on hotel shoppers. ChatGPT and other large language models have put the online travel agencies "under real threat," said Hilton SVP and Chief Information Officer Michael Leidinger Tuesday at an industry event. The OTAs' edge was aggregating a fragmented market. Now a traveler can type a stack of requirements into a chatbot and get a workable itinerary, he said. "It really, for the first time, puts the OTAs under real threat, because in many ways they were providing those aggregated views in this highly fragmented environment and now, the LLMs have kind of, they're providing that," Leidinger said in an onstage interview at the Destination AI conference in Washington, D.C. He said Hilton's view was that the rise of LLMs and agentic AI are providing "much more of an opportunity for us to d