Agoda: Indians adopt AI

Agoda says 68% of Indian travellers are likely to use artificial intelligence to plan their next trip, up from 33% who already do. (agoda.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) The figures come from Agoda’s 2026 Travel Outlook Report, released in November 2025 and based on a survey of Agoda customers across key Asia-Pacific markets. Agoda’s India market snapshot says 53% of Indian respondents trust AI-generated travel information, while 36% feel neutral and 12% distrust it. (agoda.com, agoda.com) Indian travellers said they want AI for specific planning tasks, not just open-ended search. Agoda’s data shows 38% want local attraction and activity recommendations, 37% want personalised itineraries, 29% want destination suggestions, 23% want dining recommendations, and 22% want budget help. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, socialsamosa.com) That puts AI in the middle of the part of travel that used to mean tabs, lists, maps, and reviews. Agoda’s broader 2026 report says travellers across Asia are also expecting more connected booking flows, where flights, hotels, and activities are combined in one personalised interface. (agoda.com, agoda.com) India’s numbers also sit inside a wider travel shift that Agoda tracks in the same report. More than a third of Indian travellers, 35%, said they plan to travel more domestically than internationally in 2026, up from 25% a year earlier, and 51% said they expect to split travel equally between domestic and international trips. (agoda.com) Agoda has already been testing AI trip-planning products in India. In June 2025, the company launched an AI Vacation Planner for Indian travellers, built with Google’s Gemini and Imagen tools, to generate detailed itineraries and recommendations from user prompts. (agoda.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) Agoda has kept adding AI features since then. In January 2026, it launched a Booking Form Bot that the company said would help travellers complete bookings more confidently across its inventory of more than 6 million properties, 130,000 flight routes, and 300,000 activities. (agoda.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) For travel companies, the signal is less about chatbots than workflow. Indian users are telling Agoda they want software that can narrow choices, assemble plans, and keep working from destination discovery to dining and budgeting. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, agoda.com) The immediate test is whether those tools move from marketing feature to booking habit. Agoda’s survey suggests many Indian travellers have already crossed that line, or expect to on their very next trip. (agoda.com, socialsamosa.com)