Recalibrating Travel: What AI Changes, and What It Doesn’t

The Decision Brief Christopher Nassetta, President & CEO, Hilton Moderated by Sean O’Neill, Skift THE VERDICT Every travel operator is weighing where to use AI first: to chase growth or to optimize profitability. Nassetta said Hilton has done both. He launched Hilton’s Project RISE in mid-2025, targeting 75 to 100 basis points of owner margin improvement through AI and process redesign. “Our job is to try and drive the absolute best profit per room we can,” Nassetta said. He said non-residential fixed investment exceeded 10% in Q2 2026, a level he said has been reached only twice since World War II, which gives the industry room to make structural cost improvements while demand is strong. The question for any travel company: can you use this economic wave to gain margins, or will you wait for a “normal” economic cycle? PATHS FORWARD Commit to recurring margin improvement vs. one-off cuts. Nassetta said Hilton has teams “literally 100% committed to figuring out the next program” after RISE. He said he wants margin improvement to become “a recurring thing with dedicated people doing nothing but waking up every day thinking about it.” Travel companies treating AI-driven efficiency as a single initiative won’t build lasting success. Rebuild the tech stack before you need it. “I don’t want to have a world where all these startups … can outmaneuver us [with] agility and speed that we can’t have,” he said. Nassetta said he decided seven or eight years ago to scrap Hilton’s entire legacy technology and rebuild it, a decision that now lets Hilton move quickly on AI. Any travel company still running legacy systems is losing time it cannot recover. Give frontline staff better tools, instead of fewer people. “We’re a business of people serving people,” he said. Nassetta said AI will give hotel staff real-time customer information, resulting in a better human experience. Travel companies that use AI savings to cut staff are solving the wrong problem. WHAT TO WATCH The AI-driven infrastructure spending cycle is still scaling up. “We’re not even at the peak of the cycle,” Nassetta said, adding that it will eventually “get overcooked and there’ll be winners and losers. That’s just the way things work.” The challenge will be to add margins while the tailwind lasts. How travel companies calibrate the balance between humans and AI in an agent-driven world. AI gives frontline staff real-time information about what a customer wants and what’s going wrong, while the human interaction is what builds loyalty. Watch whether fulfillment becomes a genuine competitive advantage or just another commodity as agent volume grows. Access all the Skift Takeaways from this event, as well as full session videos, presentation documents, and more editorial coverage at our Skift Global Forum attendees hub.