How Amadeus technology is helping the industry create Travel Dreams

When booking accommodation, travelers, whether business or leisure, know they have access to more choice than ever before. They can also make their views known through a variety of feedback channels, either celebrating a successful stay or highlighting when their needs were not met.

More than ever, success in hospitality depends on listening to travelers, understanding their wishes, and, where possible, exceeding expectations. With this in mind, we recently undertook our second Travel Dreams research project, hearing from hoteliers and destination management companies (DMOs) across key markets on the opportunities and challenges they face, while also listening to 6,000 frequent travelers about their hopes for the year ahead.

Below, we explore some of the highlights of the research and, importantly, where Amadeus technology delivers against what the industry is asking for. From insights to execution, we are focused on bringing together our portfolio to deliver best-in-class solutions that meet customer needs.

When questioned by researchers, 74% of travelers said they are keen to have their trips personalized, something long understood, but challenging to deliver. Doing so requires comprehensive data to understand traveler preferences, as well as the ability to retail attributes and services that meet those needs.

To meet this demand, Amadeus Travel Intelligence is a comprehensive suite of solutions designed to transform complex information into actionable intelligence. By analyzing hundreds of millions of bookings, searches, and traveler behaviors across airlines, hotels, and destinations, we help industry leaders anticipate demand, optimize strategies, and deliver better experiences.

Demand360®, for example, provides insight into where travelers are searching and booking globally, helping hoteliers spot trends and adjust strategy. This tool shows how hotel occupancy and forward-looking hotel bookings are performing, drawing on actual bookings made for future dates, not forecasts.

Revenue360® shifts the focus to performance, helping hoteliers understand how their revenue compares to competitors and where opportunities may be missed.

Alongside these datasets, Amadeus provides an AI chatbot embedded across the platform, Amadeus Max for Advisor. Instead of manually digging through dashboards, hoteliers can ask questions in plain language, such as trends on a route or shifts in demand, and receive quicker, data-informed insight.

The Travel Dreams 2026 research is clear. Data now sits at the core of most of what hoteliers and DMOs do, shaping how they understand traveler preferences, measure performance, and drive outcomes across operations, acquisition, and benchmarking. It is no surprise that the most cited technology investment for 2026 among survey respondents is data integration, bringing fragmented systems together, making information usable, and turning insight into action.

Travel Dreams 2026 also revealed a willingness from travelers to spend on attributes and services that appeal to them. Well-targeted retailing of room elements or add-on services could represent a meaningful incremental revenue opportunity for a mid-sized property, without adding a single extra room.

Our research found travelers are willing to pay more for a range of attributes, including early check-in, specific views, curated experiences, and even enhanced in-room services. To build and retail these experiences, we offer tools that help hoteliers create the offers guests are looking for.

The Amadeus Central Reservation System (ACRS®) gives hoteliers a single platform to manage rates, availability, and distribution across all booking channels. It improves consistency and control, whether rooms are sold directly or through third parties. The solution supports large hotel groups in attribute-based selling, enabling guests to personalize key aspects of their stay, from room characteristics to experiences, in a scalable, enterprise environment. For mid-scale properties, it’s designed to be simpler and more cost-effective, bringing core capabilities to smaller hotel groups without unnecessary complexity.

Beyond operations, ACRS supports more dynamic and personalized retailing. By using guest and market data, it enables hoteliers to tailor offers, adjust pricing in real time, and package services more effectively, helping support conversion and revenue performance.

The iHotelier CRS® brings similar principles of choice, flexibility, and personalization to independent and midsized chains, enabling tailored packages, add-ons, and personalized booking journeys that help support higher value direct bookings.

Reaching travelers with the right information at the right time is another critical piece of the puzzle. Our insights show that different age groups and regions require different messaging to inspire engagement.

For example, surveyed travelers from India are nearly twice as likely to be tempted by nature holidays than those from the UK. Nearly a third of Gen Z respondents surveyed are considering solo travel or adventure tourism in the next 12 months. These insights create significant opportunity with the right targeting.

To help address this, Amadeus Advertising Solutions takes a broad spectrum of industry data available, and then combines it with attributes which can help to highlight retail options travelers never knew were available. Through the Amadeus Travel Platform, we also connect hotels and aggregators with a global network of travel agencies, presenting rich, accurate hotel content that helps customers stand out in the market.

Nowhere is change happening faster than in AI, and Travel Dreams 2026 shows this technology is now reshaping both how travelers plan and book and how hoteliers run their businesses. On the demand side, traveler trust is climbing quickly: the share of travelers using chatbots to inspire their journeys has tripled in five years, from 6% to 18%. Travelers told us that AI is most helpful when planning (42%) and finding inspiration (36%), with 69% now confident that AI-generated summaries give them enough detail to make an informed choice without further research.

Hoteliers are investing accordingly. AI has moved from experiment to core strategy: 499 of the 500 hoteliers surveyed plan to invest in AI in 2026, spending an average of $319,000 per property. As more journeys begin in AI environments, hoteliers now cite getting generative engine optimization (GEO) and search engine optimization (SEO) right, so that a property appears in AI-generated summaries, as the single most important strategy for driving customer demand in 2026.

This is precisely where Amadeus can help. We are uniquely positioned to orchestrate the AI-enabled travel ecosystem, connecting suppliers, sellers, and AI assistants to trusted, dynamic travel data at scale, in a secure and responsible way. Putting this into practice in hospitality, we recently launched a new AI commerce solution that helps hotels stay visible and capture demand in emerging AI-powered channels, with agentic capabilities that enable fully embedded, end-to-end booking within conversational flows. It draws on the strength of our portfolio and is reinforced by our work with Google and other industry leaders to co-develop the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for Lodging, a common framework for AI-driven commerce.

Within this solution sits our Performance Manager – AI Search, which helps structure content to improve discoverability in AI-generated results, laying the foundation for a comprehensive GEO strategy. Early pilots are promising, with 44.7% of AI-driven visitors reaching the booking engine, compared with 25.9% from organic traffic. While on hotels’ own channels, a new AI Booking Assistant embedded in our Website Solutions and the iHotelier Booking Engine brings conversational experiences that help guests find what they need and complete bookings more easily.

Our research shows that traveler needs are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making the ability to understand, track, and respond to them critical for hoteliers and DMOs.

Expectations now span the full journey, from retail and booking experiences, to services while traveling, to environmental standards. Businesses that fail to listen and act risk being overtaken by competitors delivering more relevant and personalized experiences.

Cloud solutions are enabling hoteliers to adopt a flexible, multi-vendor approach, where tools are integrated, and data is shared and synchronized to create an optimal technology ecosystem. Within this shift, Amadeus is playing an important role, building seamless integrations that bring together the intelligence hoteliers and destinations need to build profitable demand, while providing the tools that help them differentiate and connect with travelers in an increasingly competitive market.