Travel Demand Is Resilient. Customer Expectations Are Not.

The global travel market reached $1.67 trillion in gross bookings in 2025, extending its recovery well beyond pre-pandemic benchmarks. Online travel bookings alone surpassed $1 trillion. In the U.S., 71% of Americans have budgeted for travel in 2026, with more than half planning three or more trips this year.

But demand alone does not guarantee revenue. Deloitte’s 2026 Travel Industry Outlook warns that financial caution is now reaching higher-income groups—the travelers who historically drive disproportionate spend. Meanwhile, consumers are comparison-shopping more aggressively, switching brands faster, and increasingly delegating trip planning to AI agents that evaluate price, availability, and reviews on their behalf.

71% of Americans have budgeted for travel in 2026, with more than half planning three or more trips.Source: IPX1031, Americans Travel Report 2026

The opportunity is massive. But the brands that capture it will be those that deliver seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—before, during, and after the reservation. Here’s what that looks like in 2026.

Pre-Booking: Where Social Commerce, AI, and Messaging Converge

The way travelers research and book trips has fundamentally shifted. Traditional search is no longer the default starting point. According to Phocuswright, the share of travelers beginning trip planning with a search engine has declined sharply year over year. Instead, travelers are discovering destinations, comparing properties, and making booking decisions inside social media feeds, messaging threads, and AI-powered assistants.

Social Commerce Is Now a Booking Channel

Social commerce—the ability to discover and purchase directly within social platforms—has crossed a critical threshold for travel. The global social commerce market is valued at $2 trillion in 2025, and U.S. social commerce sales are projected to surpass $100 billion in 2026.

For travel and hospitality, this is no longer abstract. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are evolving from inspiration channels into booking engines. Skift Research reports that social media platforms are becoming full-fledged booking tools where creators serve as the new travel agents and short-form video replaces static ads.

61% of travelers have booked a hotel after seeing it on Instagram. 32% have booked accommodations they discovered on TikTok.Source: OysterLink; Skift Research

Consider what this means for a hotel or resort brand. A potential guest sees a creator’s room tour on TikTok, taps a booking link in the post, and completes their reservation without ever visiting the brand’s website. The entire journey—discovery, consideration, conversion—happens inside a single app. Brands that aren’t equipped to participate in that journey are invisible at the point of decision.

Messaging Channels Have Multiplied—and Matured

The channels where travelers expect to interact with brands have expanded well beyond email and phone. Messaging is now the preferred engagement method for a majority of consumers globally. But the messaging landscape in 2026 looks very different than it did even two years ago.

RCS (Rich Communication Services) has reached critical mass. Apple’s adoption of RCS in iOS 18 (late 2024) removed the last major barrier to universal rich messaging. Since that rollout, global RCS business messaging traffic grew 500% year-over-year, with North American volumes alone increasing 1,400%. RCS enables travel brands to send verified, branded messages with carousels, images, booking buttons, and interactive maps—all within the native messaging app on any device. No app download required.

Apple Messages for Business gives brands a presence inside the Messages app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac—where Apple’s most loyal (and highest-spending) customers already communicate. Travelers can start conversations from Maps, Safari, or Spotlight Search and seamlessly move from inquiry to booking.

Instagram and TikTok DMs are becoming primary service channels. When a traveler sees a property on their feed and has a question—room types, availability, group rates—they increasingly reach out via direct message rather than navigating to a website. Brands need to be staffed and tooled to handle these conversations at scale.

Google Business Messages and WhatsApp continue to serve as high-intent channels, particularly for international travelers. Two-thirds of consumers globally prefer interacting with brands via messaging, and these platforms remain essential for brands with a global guest base.

Global RCS business messaging traffic grew 500% year-over-year after Apple adopted RCS in late 2024. North American volume increased 1,400%.Source: Infobip, 2025

AI-Powered Conversations Before the Booking

Travelers still want personalized advice and recommendations before they commit. What’s changed is how they access it. Approximately 3 in 10 Americans will use AI to help plan trips in 2026, with the top applications being discovering activities and restaurants, finding destinations, and building itineraries.

On the brand side, AI is transforming pre-booking engagement. Hotels and travel companies are deploying AI concierges across chat, messaging, and voice channels that can answer questions about room types, suggest personalized packages based on traveler preferences, and even complete reservations—all in real time, in any language. The hybrid model emerging as the standard: AI handles the initial inquiry and qualification, then hands off the full conversation context to a human agent for complex or high-value interactions.

This matters commercially. Hotels with AI-powered chat are capturing significantly more direct bookings by responding to after-hours inquiries instantly and surfacing upsell recommendations during the conversation. The brands that treat messaging as a revenue channel—not just a support channel—are seeing the results.

Ratings, Reviews, and Q&A: Still the Trust Layer

Social proof remains one of the most powerful drivers of booking confidence. The vast majority of travelers read ratings and reviews for hotels before booking, and this behavior shows no signs of declining. What has changed is the surface area. Travelers now encounter reviews on Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, the brand’s own site, and increasingly within social media feeds and AI-generated travel recommendations.

Q&A is similarly distributed. Travelers post questions on Google Business Profiles, on OTA listings, and via DMs on social platforms. They expect fast, accurate answers. Brands that leave these questions unanswered lose bookings to competitors who don’t.

During the Reservation: Real-Time, Proactive, and Conversational

Once a guest has booked, the relationship shifts from acquisition to experience delivery. Messaging becomes the connective tissue for the entire stay.

Proactive Guest Communication

Leading brands are using messaging channels to proactively check in with guests throughout their stay. After a customer checks into their room, hotel staff can send a message confirming their room meets expectations and offering assistance. Guests use the same channel to request housekeeping, order room service, report issues, or ask for local recommendations.

For car rental brands, messaging enables real-time check-ins during the rental period and streamlined reporting of issues or vehicle damage. Airlines leverage messaging to push flight status updates, gate changes, and rebooking options to passengers who’ve already booked—reducing call center volume and improving the traveler experience.

AI Makes Proactive Service Scalable

The challenge with proactive guest communication has always been scale. You can’t have a human agent personally reach out to every guest at every property. AI changes that equation. AI-powered systems can send contextual, personalized messages at the right moment—a welcome message at check-in, a dinner recommendation at 5 PM, a late checkout offer the morning before departure—while routing complex requests to human agents with full conversation history intact.

This isn’t theoretical. Industry data shows that 67% of customer service interactions in hospitality are now handled by AI-integrated tools, and 70% of hotel guests find chatbots helpful for routine requests. The key is ensuring these tools are connected to your CRM and guest profile data so that every interaction feels personal, not robotic.

67% of customer service interactions in hospitality are now handled by AI-integrated tools. 70% of guests find chatbots helpful for routine requests.Source: Autohost; Hotel Guest Tech Report 2025

Post-Reservation: Feedback, Recovery, and Loyalty

The reservation is over. The customer journey isn’t. Post-stay engagement is where brands build long-term loyalty—or lose customers permanently.

Engaging with Reviews Across Every Platform

Travel and hospitality customers share feedback across multiple sites: Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, and the brand’s own channels. They also post reviews and recommendations on social media, where the content reaches a much wider audience of potential travelers.

Brands must engage with reviews regardless of sentiment and regardless of platform. Responding to negative reviews is an opportunity to regain trust—and future travelers will see that response. Research shows that 73% of customers would reconsider a product with a negative review if the brand provided a sufficient response.

73% of customers would reconsider a product with a negative review if there was a sufficient response from the brand.Source: 1440, The Growing Role of UGC in the Purchase Journey

Responding to positive reviews matters too. It signals to loyal customers that their experience and feedback are valued. And the aggregate insights from review data—what guests love, what they complain about, what they wish you offered—are among the most actionable inputs a brand can use to improve operations and marketing.

Fostering Loyalty Through Messaging and Social Channels

Messaging is a natural channel for post-stay engagement. A guest who had an issue during their stay can reach out via their preferred messaging channel to resolve it. Delivering a fast, empathetic resolution through that channel directly increases the likelihood of repeat business.

Beyond service recovery, messaging channels are increasingly used to enroll guests in loyalty programs, share personalized offers for future stays, and book repeat reservations. Social channels play a parallel role: a guest who tags your property in a positive post is giving you free, high-credibility content that can be amplified to drive future bookings.

Native Language Communication Is a Baseline Expectation

Travel is inherently global. Language barriers are a daily reality for hotels, airlines, rental car companies, and tour operators. In 2026, communicating with guests in their preferred language isn’t a differentiator—it’s a minimum expectation.

Research consistently shows that the vast majority of consumers expect brands to communicate with them in their preferred language, whether they’re traveling domestically or abroad. AI-powered translation has made this operationally feasible at scale. The brands that integrate real-time translation into their messaging, chat, email, and review management workflows can serve any guest in any language without adding headcount.

In Travel and Hospitality, Omnichannel Is the Baseline

Modern travelers expect seamless experiences regardless of where they are in the journey and which channel they’re using. Salesforce research found that 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across all departments. Consumers’ top frustration with brands? Disconnected experiences.

Consumers’ top frustration with brands is disconnected experiences.Source: Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer

This is especially acute in travel and hospitality, where a single trip might involve interactions across a brand’s website, social media channels, messaging apps, email, phone, and in-person touchpoints. If the agent handling a guest’s WhatsApp message doesn’t have context from their earlier Instagram DM, the experience breaks down.

Salesforce Powers the Connected Experience

Travel and hospitality brands that use Salesforce have a single source of truth for all customer interactions. Every touchpoint—messaging, social, email, voice, in-person—feeds into the same platform. Teams have context on every customer and their history with the brand, enabling personalized service regardless of channel.

Some of the world’s leading travel and hospitality brands—including Southwest Airlines, IHG Hotels & Resorts, and others—depend on Salesforce to deliver connected customer experiences at scale.

1440 Supercharges Your Omnichannel Experiences in Salesforce

Salesforce provides a powerful foundation. 1440’s suite of solutions extends its impact—empowering travel and hospitality brands to deliver more connected experiences on more channels, with AI and automation built in.

Extend Your Reach with More Messaging Channels

Consumers want to engage on their preferred channel. Today, Salesforce natively supports some messaging channels, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Messaging Studio from 1440 extends that reach to the channels that matter most in 2026: Instagram DMs, TikTok, Apple Messages for Business, Google RCS, X (formerly Twitter), Line, and others—all managed within Salesforce.

This means your teams can handle a booking inquiry that started on Instagram, a service request via RCS, and a loyalty enrollment over WhatsApp—all from the same workspace, with full conversation history and guest context.

Manage Reviews and Q&A Across All Key Platforms

Travel and hospitality customers write reviews and ask questions across a fragmented landscape of platforms. Reputation Studio from 1440 enables brands to manage all reviews and Q&A within Salesforce—regardless of where the content originated. Respond to reviews, analyze sentiment trends, surface actionable insights, and ensure no customer feedback goes unaddressed.

Engage Any Customer in Any Language

Language barriers are especially common in travel. Translation Studio from 1440 enables brands to translate anything within Salesforce: standard and custom objects, knowledge articles, email templates, chats, metadata, HTML, and more. Your teams can break down language barriers and deliver outstanding, omnichannel experiences in any language—all without leaving Salesforce.

The Window Is Open. The Question Is Whether You’re Ready.

Travel demand is strong. But the competitive landscape has shifted. Consumers are booking through social feeds, messaging with brands on channels that barely existed two years ago, and delegating decisions to AI agents that evaluate every detail.

The brands that win in 2026 will be those that meet travelers where they are—on Instagram, TikTok, RCS, WhatsApp, Apple Messages—with connected, personalized experiences powered by a single platform.

Ready to see how 1440’s suite of solutions helps leading travel and hospitality brands deliver outstanding experiences across every channel? Contact us to schedule a live demo.

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