The booking process in southern Gran Canaria is about to undergo its most radical transformation in decades. According to TUI's CEO, Sebastian Ebel, the tourism giant has already completed the technical integration that will allow travelers to book their holidays in Maspalomas or Meloneras by conversing directly with artificial intelligence.
The same cannot be said for family tourism, the most price-sensitive segment. For this group, whose travel schedules are dictated by school calendars, the CEO of TUI issues a veiled warning to Canary Island destinations: faced with rising prices in the Canary Islands, the international travel industry is overwhelmingly directing families towards destinations offering better value for money, pointing to Egypt as the main competitor to beat this year. He has a point.
OpenAI has announced that by the end of 2025, applications will be integrated into ChatGPT, a new feature that allows users to access external services directly from within their conversations with the AI. Among the first companies to join are... Booking.com and Expedia, along with others like Kayak. Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than the tourism sector in southern Gran Canaria can adapt. And, according to Agentic Hospitality, two giants of the sector—Booking.com and Expedia—want to dominate the new digital ecosystem.
The future will be decided in the realm of algorithmic personalization. While the large resorts in Meloneras are fortifying themselves with luxury to retain the customer who "still has money," the rest of the sector will have to fight for visibility in a market where the travel agent no longer has a face, but rather a natural language processing engine capable of comparing prices and destinations in milliseconds.
Within a maximum of twelve months, AI agents like ChatGPT or Gemini will cease to be mere informants and become purchase executors, allowing a German or British tourist to close a complete package simply by saying: "Find me ten days in a luxury hotel in Meloneras with a golf course and spa."
This paradigm shift spells the end for traditional Google searches. Ebel argues that conversational algorithms and visual platforms like TikTok are displacing conventional search engines in the decision-making process. For hotels in the south of the island, this means that simply appearing in the top search results will no longer suffice; the challenge now will be to be the AI's "preferred" asset in its logical recommendations, forcing resorts to undergo a radical digitization of their services and real-time availability.
The technological revolution coexists with a harsher economic reality: price inflation. Ebel acknowledges that the profile that sustains profitability in the Canary Islands is that of four- and five-star hotels, where premium customers maintain their spending power despite price increases.
