Travel Is Always On. Can the Industry Stay Connected?

The Decision Brief Richard Trinder, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships, Holafly Moderated by Dan Marcec, Intelligence Editor, Skift Sponsored by Holafly THE VERDICT The Forum spent three days talking about AI agents, digital concierges, and connected trips. All of it assumes the traveler is always online. Trinder said connectivity has become “just like the air we breathe and the water we drink” for travelers — invisible when it works, a crisis when it breaks. Every agentic AI promise made at this Forum has a single point of failure underneath it. PATHS FORWARD Integrate connectivity into the booking flow. Trinder said travel brands shouldn’t treat connectivity as a resold add-on. He said brands have already invested in digital apps that lose their value when the traveler goes offline. Any company whose app-based experience breaks at a border crossing or during a layover is handing the customer a dead screen at the moment they need help most. Build partnership models around shared responsibility. Trinder said no travel provider owns the journey end-to-end, so a connectivity failure “has an outsized impact on how you experience that trip and, therefore, a knock-on effect on brand impact, loyalty, likelihood of buying again.” Prepare the connectivity layer now for agentic AI. Trinder said if travel brands get the eSIM integration right, “you’re going to be really well set up to take full advantage of the AI revolution.” Companies building agentic tools without solving for the data layer underneath them are building on a foundation they don’t control. WHAT TO WATCH Trinder predicted eSIM integration will be invisible and universal within about two years. If gaps persist at airports, during border crossings, and on cruise ships, every connected-trip and real-time disruption tool discussed at the Forum has an infrastructure problem no one is solving at scale. Trinder cited airport Wi-Fi as unsecured and patchy, a pain point that “none of us really control” but everyone suffers from. As cyber threats increase and more of the travel experience runs through the phone, the gap between what travelers expect and what airports deliver is a vulnerability the industry has accepted rather than addressed. 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.