Brands are usually enough. That’s the lie.
Travelers might cling to logos or loyalty points out of habit. A quick heuristic. AI agents? They don’t care about your heritage. They don’t have feelings for a specific airline name.
Expedia Group is already building a marketing engine aimed strictly at these algorithms. The strategy goes by B2A. Business to Agent.
Here is the rub. Humans use brand recognition to save mental energy. AI has infinite energy to burn. It reasons through every single option. It compares every flight, every hotel thread, every price point without flinching.
The advantage flips. Name familiarity evaporates.
“Agents are becoming a new audience… in parallel with consumers and businesses,” says Expedia’s CMO, Jochen Koedijk.
He said it in Vegas this week. At a panel. It’s not a replacement game, he insists. Just a parallel track.
Sounds revolutionary? Look at the numbers.
Barely anyone is actually using them to book yet.
Less than 1.5%
That is Expedia’s traffic share coming from answer engine optimization, or AEO. A tiny slice.
Is this the future? Maybe. Right now it looks like a niche experiment. But the machines are coming. And when they arrive fully loaded, they will look for utility, not vibes.
They will parse data. Cold. Hard.
What happens to your brand when the buyer is a script that doesn’t blink?
You can sit tight. Or you can optimize for a reader who never sleeps.
The clock is ticking on 1.49%.
