Overview

The insight described here — travelers cutting out the middleman, "mostly" — captures a segment-specific rather than sector-wide shift in how trips are planned and booked. The qualifier in the title is doing real analytical work: it signals that disintermediation is occurring unevenly across the travel value chain, with flights and accommodations moving toward direct provider relationships while activities and experiences remain largely platform-mediated. This unevenness is the core finding worth unpacking, because it has different implications depending on which part of the travel stack a given organization occupies.

The Behavioural Shift

The underlying behavioural change is straightforward at the surface level: travelers increasingly go to airline and hotel websites or apps directly rather than routing bookings through a travel agency or a packaged tour operator. This is consistent with a broader multi-decade trend toward consumer disintermediation across many categories, but what distinguishes this insight is the specificity of where the trend holds and where it does not.

First, accommodation booking is shifting toward direct provider channels. Second, AI assistants and social media location tags are becoming tools travelers use to generate and plan itineraries — a distinct behavior from booking itself, operating further upstream in the decision journey. Third, activity and experience platforms such as Viator and GetYourGuide continue to dominate their segment despite the broader direct-booking trend elsewhere. Fourth, car rentals and traditional packaged tours are described as declining categories, as travelers assemble trips from individually booked components rather than bundled products.

Taken together, these four observations do not describe a single uniform behavior but rather a bifurcated one: unbundling and direct-booking in flights and lodging, continued intermediation in activities, and a new upstream discovery layer forming around AI and social media that sits before any of these bookings occur.

Why the Unevenness Matters

The temptation in reading a headline like "travelers cut out the middleman" is to treat it as a single sweeping trend applicable to the entire travel industry. The evidence base here argues against that reading. Activity and experience booking persisting through aggregator platforms is notable precisely because it runs counter to the direct-booking narrative elsewhere in the trip. This suggests that disintermediation is not simply a function of consumer preference for cutting out intermediaries in general — it is more likely a function of which category has developed strong, trusted, app-based direct channels and which has not.

Airlines and hotel chains have invested heavily over the years in direct-booking infrastructure, loyalty programs, and app experiences that give consumers a reason to bypass agencies. Activity and experience providers, by contrast, are typically small, fragmented, and locally distributed, lacking the brand recognition or booking infrastructure to compete with an aggregator that offers reviews, currency conversion, cancellation policies, and a single trusted checkout across thousands of local operators. This asymmetry plausibly explains why the same traveler who books their flight directly on an airline app and their hotel directly through a chain's app will still turn to a marketplace for a walking tour or a snorkeling excursion.

The New Discovery Layer

A second dimension of this insight — arguably the more forward-looking one — is the emergence of AI assistants and social media location tags as an itinerary-planning layer. This is a different behavior from booking itself; it concerns how travelers decide what to do and where to go before any transaction occurs. Historically, this discovery function was served by guidebooks, travel agents, and later by search engines and review sites. The shift toward AI assistants and social discovery suggests a reconfiguration of the top of the travel funnel, which has downstream implications for every player in the chain, including those benefiting from direct-booking trends in flights and hotels.

If AI assistants and social platforms increasingly determine which destinations, itineraries, and experiences travelers consider, then the entities that control this discovery layer may accrue disproportionate influence over downstream bookings, regardless of whether the transaction itself happens directly or through an intermediary. This raises a strategic question that the current evidence does not resolve: will airlines, hotels, and activity platforms find ways to embed themselves into this AI/social discovery layer, or will new intermediaries emerge specifically at this stage of the journey, potentially reintroducing a form of intermediation even as booking itself becomes more direct?

Evidence Base and Interpretation

This pattern is consistent with an insight that is picking up a real but still-emerging trend across many observers, rather than one that has been exhaustively verified by any single deep study.

This is a reasonable basis for an emerging insight, but it also means the pattern should be treated as directionally informative rather than definitively established at this stage.

The timestamps show the insight was created and updated within a very short window, which means there is not yet a track record of the pattern persisting or being reaffirmed over time. This does not undermine the insight, but it does mean that time-based validation is essentially absent so far.

Strategic Stakes

The stakes of getting this segmentation right are significant for different players in the travel ecosystem. For airlines and hotel chains, the direct-booking trend in their categories represents a continuing opportunity to capture margin previously ceded to agencies and OTAs, provided they can also capture the traveler's attention at the discovery stage where AI and social media are increasingly influential. For activity and experience providers, the persistence of intermediation through platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide suggests that the disintermediation wave has not yet reached their segment, which may be a temporary lag or a more durable structural feature given the fragmentation of local operators. For car rental companies and packaged-tour operators, the described decline suggests a category under more direct threat, as travelers increasingly favor assembling trips from individually booked components over pre-bundled products.

Likely Trajectory

Looking ahead, it is plausible that direct booking in flights and accommodations continues to solidify as the default behavior, given the scale of investment already made by providers in this direction. The activity and experience segment may see incremental erosion of platform dominance if individual operators or destination management organizations build stronger direct-booking tools, but the fragmentation of this segment makes a rapid shift toward disintermediation less likely in the near term. The more consequential trajectory to watch is the discovery layer: as AI assistants and social media become more central to itinerary planning, the question of who captures and monetizes that layer — providers, platforms, or new AI-native intermediaries — is likely to become a more significant strategic battleground than the booking transaction itself. This insight, at its current stage of evidentiary maturity, is best read as an early but coherent signal of this broader reconfiguration rather than a fully validated structural shift.