Will AI Disrupt — or Entrench — the Travel Industry's Big Players? | Rafat Ali (Founder & CEO, Skift)

Travel is one of the most demo-friendly use cases for AI — and one of the hardest industries to actually disrupt.

Every AI launch seems to promise the same thing: “Tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plan everything.” But behind the slick demos sits a deeply consolidated industry dominated by platforms, hotel chains, and airlines that optimize for upsell and extraction.

Rafat Ali is the founder and CEO of Skift, which bills itself as “the daily homepage for the global travel industry.” We discuss whether AI is likely to have a traveler-friendly effect — or whether the big platforms will just use these new tools of hyper-personalization to extract even more from us.

We cover:

• Whether AI creates new intermediaries—or just strengthens existing giants
• Why no breakout consumer AI travel startup has emerged (yet)
• Where AI does work in travel today: ops, logistics, and B2B automation
• Why travel is a graveyard for “great UX, bad business” startups (RIP Hipmunk
• Rafat’s dad hacks for traveling with three kids

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Featured voices:

• Rafat Ali — Founder and CEO of Skift
• Me (Dan Blumberg) — I’m the host of CRAFTED. and the founder of Modern Product Minds. HMU if you want to build something great! I love building from zero to one.

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