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12 minutes readContents
- From experiment to global platform: The RateHawk story
- The AI Imperative: Start now, scale gradually
- The panel: Five industry trends, four expert perspectives
- The decade ahead in five shifts
- What it all adds up to
From experiment to global platform: The RateHawk story
Today, RateHawk is a B2B booking platform for travel professionals — offering access to 3.2 million hotels, 450+ airlines across 150 countries, transfers, car rentals, and rail. It serves 110,000 clients. But it didn’t start with a grand plan.
Felix Shpilman,
CEO and President of Emerging Travel Group
“Let’s be honest, RateHawk happened as an experiment, almost an accident,” said Felix Shpilman, CEO and President of Emerging Travel Group, during the fireside chat. The group had been assembling hotel supply to compete on the B2C side — and it wasn’t working.
“But in the process, we realized that the same supply could make travel agents’ lives easier. In the beginning, we literally took our original B2C product, added basic invoicing functionality, dropped prices, and added our supply consolidation engine under the hood. That was the first MVP.”
“Every global growth playbook will tell you to validate market by market. We hired a country head, adjusted the product, and started selling. Some markets closed within months. Most stuck. The cost of trying was low, so we tried everywhere.”
Getting to 110,000 clients was one kind of problem — speed, supply, and the willingness to try. The next ten years present a different one entirely: AI reshaping how travel is sold and serviced, a generation that discovers trips on TikTok before they ever reach a booking site, customer expectations set by the convenience economy, and APIs being rebuilt to make all of it work.
That’s what the rest of Futurecast set out to address.
The AI Imperative: Start now, scale gradually
Felix Shpilman,
CEO and President of Emerging Travel Group
The most common mistake travel professionals make with AI right now is waiting. Waiting for the technology to mature, for the right tool to emerge, for someone else to figure it out first. Felix Shpilman, CEO and President of Emerging Travel Group, was blunt:
“You cannot afford to wait until the technology matures because you will be behind. If you’re not using ChatGPT or Claude, you should start. If you are using it, you should try to automate your basic things.”
The approach that works, according to Shpilman: automate one thing at a time, treat early attempts as experiments you may throw out, and scale gradually. He speaks from experience — he now runs what he calls “a mini army of AI agents” across his communication channels, handling email, calendar, contacts, and internal tasks.
But the tools are only half the equation. AI is only as effective as the data feeding it. “If your customer data is in different places and it’s not connected, it will be difficult.” Clean CRM systems, organized processes, and connected data aren’t nice-to-haves — they’re prerequisites.
The payoff, though, is significant. Shpilman argued that AI is making truly individual personalization possible for the first time in the internet’s history. For travel professionals, that means recommendations, offers, and service that adapt to each traveler — not to a segment.
From the report: Travel professionals are ready to delegate
The white paper confirms the shift Felix Shpilman described:
- 57% already show a positive attitude toward using AI at work — and when it comes to specific tasks, nearly half are ready to hand them over.
- 49.7% trust AI to follow up with clients about pending payments.
- 49.5% trust it to check visa or document requirements.
- 49.2% trust it to assess external risks — geopolitical or weather-related — before making a booking.
The pattern is clear: repetitive, time-consuming, lower-stakes work is where delegation starts. The competitive advantage goes to those who start now and build confidence before agentic AI becomes the baseline.
AI is the engine — but the questions it raises about traveler behaviour, trust, infrastructure, and the role of the travel agent are what the rest of Futurecast unpacked.
The panel: Five industry trends, four expert perspectives
Artificial intelligence doesn’t change travel alone. It collides with shifting generational behaviour, rising expectations, new discovery habits, and infrastructure that wasn’t built for any of this. The panel took on that collision.
New generations aren’t coming. They’re already here
The temptation is to treat Gen Z as a trend that hasn’t landed yet. In India, it’s already a present reality. Vaibhav Singh, Chief Business Officer at MakeMyTrip, shared numbers that should make any travel business pause: 1 in 4 MakeMyTrip customers is Gen Z. Nearly half of all new user acquisition comes from this generation.
Their behaviour breaks the old playbook: last-minute bookings, budget-conscious but aspirational, offbeat over mainstream. And a fundamental trust shift — they trust creators, not ads.
Vaibhav Singh,
Chief Business Officer International Hotels and Hotel Supply, MakeMyTrip
Vaibhav Singh, Chief Business Officer International Hotels and Hotel Supply, MakeMyTrip: “The mental model, if you want to call it, is: save on the room, splurge on the experience. A creator is a person who has stayed in that homestay, done that trek, found that offbeat café and is talking about it. That converts better than any banner you can put anywhere.”
Siiri Palisaar,
Senior Director at Lufthansa City Center
Siiri Palisaar, Senior Director at Lufthansa City Center, added a layer: it’s not just about Gen Z. Gen Alpha is next — raised on top-tier service at home, expecting the same from every brand they touch. And in a world flooded with AI-generated noise, trusted guidance becomes more valuable, not less: “In all that noise, brands will become important and guidance becomes important. The younger generation is probably well taken care of by parents. I can at least say that for my Gen Z at home. She’s used to the top service at home, and I think Gen Alpha will not be any different.”
From the report: Social media isn’t a marketing channel — for new generations, it’s where decisions get made
The report adds a layer to the creator-over-ads shift Singh described: it’s not just about trust — it’s about where decisions happen.
- 64% of Gen Z travelers have made a travel decision based on content they saw on social media.
- Among “indulgent explorers” — a high-value segment identified by Phocuswright — social media is the single biggest influence for Gen Z and millennial travellers.
And this will only intensify. Gen Alpha, born 2010–2024, is growing up even more digitally native, more willing to share experiences online, and more accustomed to consuming information in quick impressions, memes, and reels.
For travel professionals, this means social media isn’t a promotion channel — it’s a community-building and decision-making platform where your brand either exists or doesn’t.
Trust is the new infrastructure
None of the above — AI, new generations, shifting discovery channels — works without something holding it together underneath.
Sinéad Reilly of Travelport reframed what “technology” actually means in this context. It’s not features. It’s trust. APIs aren’t plumbing — they’re the layer that lets AI tools actually reach the traveller. Without standardized, AI-ready infrastructure, none of the shifts above land.
Sinéad Reilly,
Senior Director Global Enterprise Sales, Travelport
Sinéad Reilly, Senior Director Global Enterprise Sales, Travelport:“For me, it is all about trust — whether that trust is in technology, in pricing, or in the partnerships that you build. The space that is emerging between AI, APIs and humans, and how we all manage to coexist effectively — it should not be underestimated.”
Travelport’s Trip Services API is cloud-native and AI-enabled — built so that “it doesn’t matter where you go, what airline, what hotel company — you as the agency receive a standardized approach.” The goal is to remove decades of accumulated complexity so the AI era can actually function.
And what disappears in 10 years? Not airports. Not agents. “Delays. Not airport delays — response delays. Twenty-four hours on an email is too long.”
From the report: APIs are what make everything else possible
Every trend discussed at Futurecast — AI, personalization, instant responses, agentic booking — depends on one thing working underneath: connected infrastructure. The white paper positions technology not as a back-office concern but as the most direct route to growth.
RateHawk’s response — 1,400 API partners and a 40% year-on-year growth in bookings per partner — demonstrates what happens when infrastructure catches up.
The convenience benchmark: Your competition isn’t other agents
The generations changed. The discovery changed. The infrastructure is catching up. But the benchmark travelers measure you against? That changed the fastest of all.
Ilya Kravtsov,
CCO of Emerging Travel Group
Ilya Kravtsov, CCO of Emerging Travel Group, landed the point that ties everything together: travel professionals aren’t just competing with each other anymore. They’re competing with every instant-gratification experience their customers have ever had: “If I can get a taxi in two minutes, if I can get food in twenty minutes and answers from ChatGPT instantly — why would I expect something different when I’m planning a trip?”
RateHawk’s response is operational:
- 350+ aggregated suppliers,
- a Destination Shift initiative recommending alternatives in real time,
- 50%+ of guest–hotel requests now handled by AI,
- incident resolution cut by 27%,
- AI tools that let commercial teams train with a “virtual client.”
But Kravtsov’s closing point was the one that stayed: technology will keep getting better at finding answers. Your edge isn’t competing with that — it’s doing the thing it can’t: understanding other humans.
Ilya Kravtsov, Chief Commercial Officer, Emerging Travel Group: “Technology will become exceptional for finding answers, but humans will remain exceptional at understanding other humans.”
From the report: When everyone has the same tools, personality wins
The white paper’s final trend lands where Kravtsov’s point does: technology will level the playing field. Every brand will have AI. Every platform will access the same suppliers. The differentiator that remains? People.
Phocuswright data confirms it — talking to a human is the number one reason travelers still use an agent. Not because they can’t book alone, but because the moments that matter — a complex multi-stop itinerary, a last-minute flight change, knowing that a client’s birthday is next week — still require someone who listens.
The keynote: Discovery has already moved
AI reshapes operations. Infrastructure enables scale. New generations rewrite the rules. But all of it is downstream of one thing: where discovery happens — and that’s already moved.
Mikel Njeim,
Client Partner, Tourism & Events, Global Business Solutions at TikTok in MENA
Every panellist referenced digital platforms and pointed to creators. Mikel Njeim, Client Partner, Tourism & Events, Global Business Solutions at TikTok in MENA — captured the shared view: travel discovery often happens before users even visit a search engine. The question isn’t whether it’s happening — it’s whether your business is part of that moment.
Njeim opened with a point worth paying attention to if you are still relying on traditional marketing: today’s travelers move through multiple touchpoints before booking a single trip. Communities directly influenced where travelers decided to go. Not an ad. Not a search result. A person they trust.
For travel professionals, Njeim outlined three modes of engagement on TikTok:
- create for your audience (through Branded Search Hub, Search, Dynamic Travel Ads, and Symphony — TikTok’s AI-powered ad suite — among others)
- create with them (creator collaborations via TikTok One and Content Suite)
- create through them (branded missions that invite the community to produce content on your behalf)
The takeaway isn’t platform-specific, it’s structural. When travelers say a real person’s content influenced their decision, you’re no longer competing on ad spend. You’re competing on authenticity. And that’s a game where travel professionals — the ones who actually know the destinations — have an edge, if they choose to use it.
The decade ahead in five shifts
Astrid Kastberg,
Managing Director at RateHawk
Astrid Kastberg, Managing Director at RateHawk, closed the event with a point that frames all of it: “Technology will continue to change the way that we work. But the industry has always been powered by people and the relationships built over time. The future of travel is not something waiting for us in the future. It starts with the choices we make today.“
What it all adds up to
An accident became a global platform. A ten-year anniversary became a challenge to the industry. And the message from every speaker — from ETG’s CEO to TikTok’s Global Business Solutions team — converged on the same point:
The next decade won’t reward the businesses that react. It will reward the ones already moving — adopting AI before it’s polished, showing up on platforms where decisions are made before they look like decisions, investing in infrastructure that makes everything else work, and remembering that when every competitor has the same technology, the human who understands the customer is the only real differentiator left.
The white paper has the full research. Futurecast had the conversation.
Download the full Phocuswright white paper to explore the data behind every trend discussed here — and start building your strategy for what comes next.
