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According to Christodoulou, travel is moving away from decades of fragmentation and back toward consolidation—this time powered by AI, localisation and unified platforms.
Romain Christodoulou, Vice President Supply, Agoda shares insights on “The Great Travel Reset: Local, Transparent, Intelligent and Unified” while presenting at the TDM Global Summit Singapore 2025
Romain Christodoulou
From Fragmentation to Unification once more
Explaining his topic on the Great Travel Reset, he says: “If you think about travel, I think travel is going through a cycle, it’s getting back to earlier stages than what it was before. Think 1890s, think about France. I picked a country randomly. At this stage, if you want to travel, you would go to one of the domestic counters, you would probably use a queue, and then you would order in one place, with one desk, your entire travel. You would order a train ticket, a boat ticket, you would get your insurance. So, it’s a very global and duly integrated experience. Let’s call it phase one. Then you have phase two.”
“In phase two you experience scale coming. So, scale is coming with airlines going global. Scale is coming with GDS starting to distribute rooms and seats all over the world. Scale is coming with Internet, and you have meta-searches, you have search engines, you have OTAs, and everybody starts owning a piece of travel, which means that we are moving from a very local, very fully integrated experience to a more standardised, to a more fragmented experience. And that’s phase two. And now I’m calling it the Great Travel Reset, because I think with technologies like AI, you’re eventually getting back to global players, localising their experience, and demand and supply is getting consolidated again.”
Various styles of tie dye, Japanese Shiori technique. Textile print for bed linen, jacket, package design, fabric and fashion concepts
Sharing the four main travel trends he adds:
Trend 1: All Global players are LOCALISING experiences
“Take any major industry, and you take those global players, they all end up localising their experiences for customers in order to be able to win. It’s not specific to travel. Christodoulou adds: “Think about on-demand services. Here in Asia, Grab and Uber, Grab ended up acquiring Uber activities because they managed to go with very local payment methods. They managed to offer mobility such as motorbikes, which was critical in some markets like Thailand or Indonesia. Other players include Shopee taking over from Lazada. Taobao taking over from eBay, and in India, Zomato taking over from Uber. Same logic, same pattern. And I do believe that travel is no exception to this rule.”
What is going to make travel localised?
Product
“If you think about the product, the question you want to answer is, how can I offer a very native experience to local consumers? It means that you need to have a localised product team. At Booking Holdings and Agoda, we have localised products crowds that are working specifically for Japan, for Indonesia, for India. And you want to test constantly on search, inventory display, prices, languages, etc”
Payment
On Payment he adds: “Everybody will think about integrating payment methods, and it’s true that the core of the game is so. You want to integrate payment methods. If you think about markets like India, you want to be able to display credit card discounts and to have the banks that offer these discounts displayed on your platform, so you offer the right prices. And it goes along the way with buy now, pay later, the wallet, among other options.”
Partnerships
Even as a global player one needs to have the right partnerships locally. He adds: “This will enable you to capture the local segments of travellers that you might not capture easily with your co-operating model.” Giving an example he continues: “When you think about marketing, you would think micro-influencer, for instance. How will you partner with micro-influencers so you can tap into a demand that is not easy to access? And that’s the case for supply and demand.”
Young Japanese Woman in Traditional Kimono Dress at the Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in Temple in Kyoto, Japan with full bloom cherry blossom in spring
Understanding the Japanese market
Sharing case studies from the Agoda experience he says: “I’m talking about Japan, and I’m talking about Onsens and Ryokans. Onsens and Ryokans are, let’s say, the WG 10 to 20% of the inventory of hotels in Japan. So, it’s definitely a segment you want to crack. So how do you crack Onsens and Ryokans to offer the right experience to local travellers? The first thing is you need to reduce at all costs the number of clicks and to make the experience seamless. So, you’re going to bring back a category more visible to the customers, and you’re going to simplify the navigation. So, we will display what are the different Onsen destinations. We, will take back an AD test regularly and the different keywords that matter to those customers. And then you go further. You want to display the right map, for instance.”
People walking in Gion Shijo Kyoto, the Old Town part of Kyoto. Kyoto has a population of 1.4 million people
“And Japanese travellers are going to search by prefecture. So, you will do a prefecture map, and then you will add this search experience, this first intent experience with the right quality and seamless navigation. Then the customers will go to an Onsens hotel, and they need to see the right level of description for the activity. So, you need to standardise the way you’re going to bring the information to the travellers. So not only do they find what they need, but there is a pattern when they navigate between different suppliers. And then it goes further. Japanese travellers are booking families. There is an entire range of, I would say, child policies. So, you need to be able to support them in booking for the family with different prices for the kids, for the parents, etc.”
“So that’s very specific in Japan. That’s part of the product development that we do. And you close on payments. I was talking about payments earlier, but if you think about Japan, you think about cashless transactions. 20% of the transactions in Japan are done through PayPay, secure payments capturing very much young travellers. And so, if you want to capture those young travellers, you need to have these payment methods available.
This is another example of how Agoda, as a global OTA, is seeking local to offer a native experience to consumers. The outcome of that is that Agoda today is the number one, which was not the case before. The number one player in app downloads and most top three-monthly active users.”
So global players, following this internationalisation of travel, are getting local to keep the success to be able to meet the demand in a very specific manner.
Young woman traveler walking at Shibuya Crossing the popular pedestrian scramble crossing in Shibuya, Tokyo
Trend 2: Unify the travel experiences for consumers
He elucidates: “The second thing I’ll talk about is how we unify the travel experiences for consumers. We were talking about this consolidating offline through, for example, the Thomas Cook counter, then moving to a very fragmented experience.
And now what we see is that more than 60% of the customers, they want to be able to book their flight, their activities, their hotel into one-stop shop. So, you need to offer that to them. So, what the customer wants, the following question for us is, do we think it’s yielding the reward when you’re doing it? And the answer is yes.
If you take the holding growth impact, booking only reported that we have 30% growth on multi-vertical bookings, meaning customers are booking more than one vertical. But further than that, on the very long-term, we see very different pattern of customers that are able to book several verticals at the same time, has higher chances to repeat than the customers that book only one vertical. So, moving from this consolidation to fragmented, that information where customers would go through very different providers in order to book their entire trip, consolidating this again.”
Trend 3: Intelligent Travel element with AI
AI is accelerating the Great Travel Reset on both the backend and frontend.
On the backend, AI is improving efficiency across departments—from code development to partner management and sales support—freeing up resources that can be reinvested into localisation and customer experience.
On the frontend, AI is reshaping how travellers research and plan trips. What once involved hours of research across dozens of websites and hundreds of tabs is becoming far more consolidated.
Backend efficiency
He says: “So on the company side, I’ll just give you two points. So, the first one is that we are constantly registering and recording, and we are constantly gathering all of these cases about AI, and it touches every single department. You can think about technology. Technology and how the developers are going to save time because now AI is supporting them to use the code or decode itself.
Those efficiencies, you can reinvest them into local travel. We manage partners, AI can help you and help the sales team to prepare the sales pitch to alternate airlines, and then it can transcript what has been the call in the meeting minutes and then send it directly to partners or automatically raise escalations.
So that’s the back end. Now on the front end, there is one thing that is sure. This consolidation is happening. Travellers, they used to spend five hours to prepare their trip, 38 websites, 277 tabs, and it’s getting to something that is way more consolidated, whether it be, you know, the occurrence of the large-scale models on the road or on your online travel agents or on direct bookings. So big question, is how will that translate over time? To answer this question, we need to divide it into many different parts. The first part is what we talked about, that research and search.”
Large-language models
On the frontend, AI is reshaping how travellers research and plan trips. What once involved hours of research across dozens of websites and hundreds of tabs is becoming far more consolidated.
Large language models are transforming search and trip discovery, capturing intent more effectively than traditional search or meta-search.
He adds: “Large-language models are going to offer a great experience when it comes to, searching what is the right trip for you and getting to know the right intent of which who gets it there. So large-language models will capture shares from meta-searches and search engines. But on the UTS side, when you think about the key success factor, the key success factor to offer a personalised experience to travellers is the data we have about these travellers.
And we have property-in-time data about the way customers are navigating on our platform. We have historical data about the way travellers are booking. Then if you pair that with AI, then I’m guessing the traveller assistance, then you can offer one of the best experiences for travellers in order to plan their trip at the very beginning.
So I would say that LLMs and OTAs are going to benefit from AI in order to capture a share of traffic at the end of the day. The following question is, can large-language models operate supply-directly? Operate bookings and payments directly? Can they operate post-booking directly? Because they have very limited time. I’ll make it short, but supply, contracting, maintaining contracts, managing, you know, escalations, tax, huge effort and cost.”
Aerial view of young woman lying on transparent canoe in blue sea at sunrise, Summer in Zanzibar
Trend 4: Transparent Travel
The final pillar of the Great Travel Reset is transparency, particularly in payments and post-booking processes.
“Payments and booking, you need to comply with finance regulations, which means, you know, KYC, AML, DCI, et cetera, which is definitely complicated. And then you need to manage cost, charge back, and so on. And then post-booking, same logic.
And that’s a similar reason why search engines in the past, or meta-searches that controlled the upper funnel, did not go bottom funnel.
Because think about their business model. Most of their business model takes 30 seconds, not minutes. That’s the reason why, you know, in the past, Google Shopping, your RTA, APA, did not necessarily go as much as meta-searches, did not go bottom funnel, because it’s a trade-off between your net profit on the road you’re at, versus what you can really make on the bottom funnel.”
He concludes with: “I really think that we are operating in a cycle, and we are getting back to where travel, by many aspects, used to be very consolidated, less fragmented, very localised experience.”
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Source: traveldailymedia