I haven’t met Glenn Fogel, the famously measured CEO of Booking Holdings, but I’ve been paying close attention to his recent comments—and they should give every traveller, investor and industry insider a shiver of déjà vu. Fogel says the current mania around artificial intelligence feels eerily like the dot-com boom.
That comparison isn’t just a throwaway line. The dot-com era of the late 1990s was a time of dizzying promise: a heady cocktail of wild valuations, champagne launches, and the magical formula of “internet + anything = the future.” We all know how it ended—spectacular gains for a few, painful collapses for many, and a slow rebuild for the survivors.
Today, AI is having its own champagne moment. Generative tools are rewriting text, creating images, even building travel itineraries faster than a seasoned tour operator. Venture capital is pouring in. Start-ups are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Everyone is convinced that AI will save time, cut costs, and delight customers. The parallels to 1999 are impossible to ignore.
Fogel’s own company is a prime example of both the excitement and the caution. Booking is betting big on what it calls “connected trips”—an elegant idea that uses AI to bundle flights, hotels, transfers and activities into one seamless experience. Imagine typing in “romantic week in Lisbon” and getting a complete, dynamically priced package built in seconds. Early trials are showing higher customer satisfaction and faster problem resolution. It’s seductive stuff.
But here’s the twist that caught my attention: Fogel is not simply cheerleading. He’s warning. And he’s right to. AI isn’t just another clever app; it’s more like a cosmic event. Think of it as a Big Bang for business and society—an explosion of capability that will create a universe governed by entirely new laws.
Once the algorithms reach a certain scale, they learn at speeds we can barely comprehend. They don’t sleep, they don’t tire, and they don’t politely wait for regulation to catch up. In travel alone, AI can already read millions of reviews, predict weather patterns, optimise airline yields, and craft bespoke itineraries in milliseconds. Multiply that across healthcare, finance, security, and politics and you begin to sense the immensity of what’s coming.
Like the birth of the cosmos, this expansion will be unstoppable. The “universal laws” of the old travel industry—commission structures, human agents, even the idea of searching for flights yourself—will bend and eventually break. Prices will shift in real time based on oceans of data. Customer service will be handled by bots indistinguishable from people. Entire job categories will disappear while new ones, unimaginable today, suddenly appear like newborn stars.
That sounds thrilling, and parts of it will be. But let’s remember the physics of bubbles: when matter expands too fast, things can shatter. Venture capital is already flooding into AI travel start-ups with sky-high valuations and very little profit. Regulators are scrambling to understand data privacy and algorithmic bias. And travellers—real human beings with birthdays, honeymoons and cancelled flights—will be the first to feel the pain when a shiny system misfires.
History offers a blunt lesson. During the dot-com frenzy, investors piled into companies with no profits and vague business plans. When the crash came, fortunes evaporated overnight. Yet out of the rubble rose the giants—Amazon, Google, Expedia—firms that married genuine utility to relentless execution. AI will likely follow the same pattern. A few players will emerge stronger than ever, but only after the froth has burned off and the new universal rules settle into place.
For travellers and industry pros, my advice is simple: enjoy the innovation but stay grounded. By all means, use AI to find a cheaper flight or a perfectly timed city break. But remember that technology is only as good as the humans who build and monitor it. Don’t outsource your common sense to a chatbot.
For businesses, the stakes are existential. Embrace AI thoughtfully, not recklessly. Invest in transparency, data ethics and human oversight. Focus on solving real problems—booking friction, customer service bottlenecks—rather than chasing buzzwords. When the inevitable correction comes, companies with genuine value will survive and even thrive. The rest will disappear into the void.
As someone who has spent a career exploring how travel connects us, I find this both exhilarating and unsettling. The promise of AI is breathtaking: imagine a world where planning a complex multi-country journey is as simple as asking a trusted friend, where prices are fair, delays are predicted before they happen, and every traveller gets an experience tailored to their quirks and dreams.
But the danger is equally profound. If we let algorithms dictate not just the mechanics of travel but the choices themselves—where to go, when to fly, how much to pay—we risk ceding control of the journey to machines whose motives we can’t fully know.
The universe that AI is creating will operate under new laws: speed over caution, prediction over spontaneity, efficiency over mystery. Travel has always been about discovery. My hope is that we don’t lose the magic of getting lost along the way.
So yes, Glenn Fogel is right. We are on the cusp of a Big Bang. The AI universe is expanding at light speed, and once the stars of this new era ignite, there’s no pulling them back. Whether you’re an investor, a travel company, or a dreamer planning your next adventure, buckle up. The journey is only beginning, and the laws of the old world may not apply for long.
The iconic line from the original Star Trek series spoken by Captain James T Kirk may yet hold true but not as we could ever have envisioned it would, “To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
