Why travelers are switching their favorite brands

Emily Weiss is senior managing director and global travel lead at Accenture.

For years, loyalty in travel was built around a relatively predictable formula: earn a customer’s trust, reward repeat purchases and create enough value to keep them coming back. 

Airlines created frequent-flyer programs. Hotels accumulated points, tiers and perks. Brands invested heavily in personalization, rewards and direct-booking strategies designed to make customers choose them again and again. 

Agentic AI is changing the equation and all stages of the customer journey, from earliest discovery through long-term loyalty and retention. That creates new challenges and opportunities for travel brands. Loyalty is no longer only about being remembered. It is increasingly about being relevant. 

Latest Accenture research, Win the AI agent, win the traveler, suggests that travelers are increasingly making decisions based not on long-standing brand relationships, but on which company can help them achieve their goal fastest and with the least effort. The survey of more than 5,000 travelers across 12 markets found that 96% would switch away from their preferred travel brand if another provider offered a significantly easier and faster experience. The vast majority ( 91%) are willing to pay more for an option that reduced the time and effort required to plan and manage a trip. 

Those figures challenge one of travel’s longest-held assumptions: that loyalty alone can protect brands from competitive disruption. In fact, according to Accenture’s Consumer Pulse 2026, 36% of loyal travelers (those who typically choose from 1-3 preferred brands within a particular category- hotel/airline) would let an agent switch from their favorite brands for a better fit. 

Travelers don’t........

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