Travel Tech Insider

Future of the Funnel

• Gilad Berenstein and Cara Whitehill • Season 4 • Episode 5

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For more than two decades, travel’s marketing funnel has been anchored by a familiar set of certainties: Google at the top, OTAs in the middle, and brand.com at the bottom. The entire industry was built around this architecture — SEO strategies, meta-search plays, display retargeting, and paid search campaigns all tuned to move consumers from inspiration to booking.

That architecture is now being dismantled in real time, or is it?

Generative AI search engines, from Perplexity to ChatGPT to Google’s own AI Overviews, are fundamentally changing how travelers discover, research, and evaluate options. When an AI gives you a direct answer, you don’t click. You don’t visit. You don’t convert the way you used to. For brands that have spent years building SEO moats and content strategies optimized for traditional search, this is an existential challenge.

But the story doesn’t end with search. Agentic AI introduces an even more radical disruption: the possibility that travelers won’t be doing the searching at all. If an AI agent is planning and booking on your behalf, what does “top of funnel” even mean? Does marketing need to reach the human — or the model?

Distribution and marketing as we’ve known them are being renegotiated from scratch. That means new questions about where brands spend, how they measure attribution, and whether reach, frequency, and click-through rates are even the right metrics anymore.

The travel brands best positioned for this shift may be the ones willing to throw out the old playbook and start fresh — partnering directly with AI platforms, investing in content that AI can parse and cite, and rethinking the relationship between brand equity and algorithmic visibility. This episode brings together the architects of the new distribution infrastructure and the marketers navigating the transition in real time. 

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Gilad Berenstein – host

Cara Whitehill - host

Brennen Bliss  — guest

Rob Torres — guest

 

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