Discover how AI, data, and customer engagement are evolving across travel and hospitality, based on insights from 336 industry marketers. Benchmark your strategy, see where leading teams are investing, and identify opportunities to strengthen traveler engagement.
A delayed flight, a loyalty question, a room issue: each moment can show whether a brand’s systems, teams, and AI are working together. Travelers expect more responsive conversations, but many marketers still struggle to act while the moment matters.
AI is increasing both capacity and complexity. It can help marketers shift focus from manual execution to relationship-building, but only if the underlying data is usable. When service notes, preferences, and operational updates sit in separate systems or unstructured sources, personalization can still arrive too late or miss the point.
Read the report to see how travel and hospitality marketers are preparing for agentic AI, improving engagement, and reducing friction in high-stakes moments.
Access the full Travel & Hospitality report below.
The Travel & Hospitality edition is an industry-focused view of Salesforce’s State of Marketing research. It highlights insights from 336 travel and hospitality marketing professionals within a broader survey of 4,450 marketers.
The findings examine how travel and hospitality marketers are responding to customer expectations, fragmented data, AI adoption, and growing pressure to personalize across the trip lifecycle. It also highlights where organizations stand today and where gaps remain as expectations continue to rise.
This edition goes deeper on the travel and hospitality findings from Salesforce’s broader research. It connects the data to industry-specific challenges such as trip disruption, traveler recognition, loyalty engagement, real-time service, and coordination across marketing, service, commerce, and operations.
Travel and hospitality organizations frequently coordinate across marketing, service, loyalty, and operations. Agentic AI can help support multi-step interactions — such as disruption recovery, loyalty support, or trip changes — when it has access to trusted data, connected systems, and clear escalation rules.
Customers increasingly expect brands to respond quickly and recognize the context of their relationship. A full 90% of travel and hospitality marketers say customers expect two-way conversations, yet 74% struggle to respond promptly. Those moments can shape whether the experience feels connected, useful, and worth returning to.
Personalization depends on more than having customer information. While 80% of travel and hospitality marketers say they have access to the customer insights they need, 69% find it difficult to extract insights from unstructured data. The challenge is turning available signals into timely, personalized traveler experiences.
Brands can start by identifying high-friction moments, building shared traveler context, and defining where AI should answer, recommend, act, wait, or escalate. Strong integration, governance, and transparency can help teams scale AI in ways that improve engagement, strengthen trust, and support business outcomes.
The research shows that travel and hospitality marketers are under pressure to respond faster, personalize more effectively, and make better use of the data they already have. It also highlights agentic AI as the next phase of marketing transformation — but only for teams with the connected systems, governance, and workflows needed to use it effectively and responsibly.