In the agentic era, travel businesses must sell brand, not destination

Recently, I sat in front of Atlas, the OpenAI browser, and typed: “Book me a week away at Christmas as cheaply as you can.” Within moments, it had done its search, done its sorting and selected all my “best” options, all of which leaned heavily on On the Beach. The fascinating part wasn’t the destination it chose - as I wasn’t going anyway. It was why that brand made it into consideration at all.

Because, for as long as most of us can remember, travel marketing has defaulted to the same creative reflex: sell the destination.

The bluer sea. The whiter sand. The cooler rooftop bar. Another drone shot. Another sunset. Another couple walking into the middle distance. But in the agentic era, that logic is starting to collapse under the weight of its own moribund sameness. Because when everything looks beautiful, nothing is distinctive. And when AI agents increasingly mediate discovery, the rules of differentiation change completely.

That is the new battleground.

We’re moving from a world where consumers scroll, compare and emotionally rationalise, to one where agents sift, optimise and recommend. Gartner predicts traditional search volume could decline by 25% by 2026 as conversational AI becomes mainstream. When discovery shifts from human browsing to machine delegation, generic marketing becomes dangerously invisible.

If every brand is selling “sun-soaked escapes” and “unforgettable city breaks,” agents will default to price, availability and historical performance data. In other words, margin compression.

Because agents don’t “see” your paid search campaign the way a human does. They synthesise reputation, consistency, authority and brand salience across the entire digital footprint. If your brand has no enduring meaning beyond “cheap flights to X,” you become a commodity node in an optimisation engine. And no one wants to be a node.

We all know the work of Binet and Field in brand. Their evidence from the IPA Effectiveness Databank has shown consistently that brands investing in long-term brand building – not just short-term activation – drive significantly greater profit growth. Campaigns with a balanced split between brand and performance (often cited around 60/40 for many categories) are proven to be more effective over time. But this brings it a new urgency.

Travel, historically, has skewed heavily towards activation. Flash sales. Tactical bursts. Performance-led acquisition. It’s understandable in a category with perishable inventory and constant price competition. But in an agentic ecosystem, over-reliance on short-termism is not just limiting growth – it’s strategically risky. Brand, as Binet and Field argue, drives mental availability. And mental availability increasingly shapes machine availability.

What cuts through instead is experience.

At The Liberty Guild, we’ve been working with Wizz Air on precisely this challenge. The recent campaign we created (produced entirely using AI platforms and workflow) didn’t sell destinations. It sold the feeling of flying Wizz: low-cost, high-energy, unapologetically bold. It was spontaneous. Super-smiley. Full of possibility.

Not “Fly to Milan.”
But “This is what it feels like to get on our planes.”

That distinction matters.

An AI agent parsing reviews, tone, brand language and cultural signals can detect consistency and distinctiveness. A brand that stands for affordable adventure with swagger is easier to separate from the pack than one trading in interchangeable sunsets.

For strategists and ambitious clients, three implications follow.

Rebalance towards long-term brand investment.
The evidence has been there for years: strong brands grow faster, command price premiums and recover more quickly from shocks. In the agentic era, they also get surfaced more consistently. Distinctive brand assets, emotional storytelling and sustained fame-building activity create durable signals in the data landscape agents learn from.

Build in your positioning everywhere.
Brand meaning cannot live solely in a TV spot. It must be coherent across UX, product descriptions, structured data, reviews, CRM and importantly earned media. When agents take everything into account, inconsistency weakens the message, so clarity becomes the advantage.

Sell a mindset, not a map.
When travellers delegate decision-making, brands must become shorthand for a type of trip or attitude. “The bold weekend.” “The easy family reset.” “The no-nonsense cheap escape.” If someone asks an agent for “the best affordable Christmas break,” your brand should logically embody that answer.

This does not mean destinations stop mattering. Of course they matter. But they are no longer a strategy in themselves. Places can be matched. Imagery can be replicated. Prices can be undercut.

Brand meaning cannot be easily copied.

Binet and Field’s work reminds us that fame, emotion and long-term distinctiveness drive disproportionate growth. The agentic era doesn’t invalidate that principle, but it does intensify it. When machines increasingly choose on our behalf, the brands with the clearest, strongest signals, separated from the noise, win.

- Jon Williams, CEO & Founder, The Liberty Guild

This article first appeared in WARC (February 2026)