Ask a traveler in the UAE how they planned their next trip. There is a good chance AI for travel already made part of the decision. Research from Tourism Economics, presented at Arabian Travel Market, found that 60 percent of UAE travelers trust AI to plan every part of a trip. Only 48 percent of travelers elsewhere say the same. Nearly six in ten had already used AI for travel planning at the time of the survey. That number is higher than what most people report trusting AI with in banking or healthcare. Travel is where people hand over control first. This year shows what companies are building to meet that trust, and it raises a question worth asking about what gets lost along the way.
Start with the part of a trip people notice least until it goes wrong, the payment. Emirates now lets customers with a Crypto.com account pay for bookings on emirates.com and the Emirates App straight from a digital wallet. The option is open to eligible UAE residents booking in Dirham. On mobile, you get sent to the Crypto.com app to approve the charge, then return to Emirates for your ticket. On desktop, you scan a QR code at checkout instead. The setup runs through Crypto.com’s Dubai entity, the first Virtual Asset Service Provider to hold a Stored Value Facilities licence from the Central Bank of the UAE. It also plugs into the Dubai Cashless Strategy under the D33 Economic Agenda, which aims for 90 percent of financial transactions across government and private sectors to go digital by the end of 2026. A small checkout option turns out to be a national target, playing out one flight booking at a time.
From there, the bigger question is what happens once payment stops being the interesting part. A project called Atlas Mode, built for a travel app named Pearl, shows where AI for travel is heading next. Instead of typing a destination into a search box, you spin an interactive globe. You discover places visually, and you get restaurant, hotel, and activity picks matched to your own taste as you explore. The app blends AI recommendations with the globe itself. It also has an audio feature built on GPT Voice 2.1, so you can talk through vacation ideas out loud instead of adjusting filters one at a time. Developers showed this project to OpenAI’s Sam Altman at a recent hackathon. It makes a point most of these projects share without saying it directly. The AI stops being something you notice using. It becomes the thing quietly deciding what you see first and what never comes up at all.
That same shift is why a warning from the same travel research deserves attention. The global meetings and events industry was worth 945 billion dollars in 2025. It is projected to pass 2.3 trillion dollars by 2032. That growth has pushed providers toward automated sourcing, real time translation, and AI generated planning at a scale nobody was running two years ago. Industry discussion at the time raised a concern that reaches well past conference planning. AI works best when it frees up time for a person to focus on what actually matters, the conversation with a guest or a real recommendation from someone who has been there. It stops working the moment automation replaces that interaction instead of making room for it. Most travelers on the other end cannot tell which one happened.
That distinction gets harder to make once you think about where travel decisions actually start now. For most people, it is not a search engine. TikTok’s recent push on AI transparency matters for travel because so much trip inspiration begins there before anyone opens a booking site. The company has labeled more than three billion AI generated videos using watermarking technology. It is also tightening detection for AI generated spam and has joined the industry group that sets the rules for this labeling. For a traveler scrolling recommendations at midnight, this transparency layer is the only thing separating real footage of a destination from a generated version built to look convincing enough to book a flight over. Nobody scrolling for travel ideas checks watermark data. That is exactly why the systems doing that checking need to work.
An airline’s payment option, a hackathon project, a global travel survey, and a social platform’s content policy were never built with each other in mind. Line them up and they describe the same year from a few different angles. AI for travel stopped being a feature attached to booking sites and recommendation feeds. It became the infrastructure those tools run on. The number worth remembering is 60 percent, because it means the trust already exists ahead of the tools built to earn it. What happens next depends less on how impressive the next Atlas Mode turns out to be. It depends on whether the industry keeps the human judgment in place that travelers still expect, even as they hand over more of the planning itself.
