At last week’s inaugural WIT (Web in Travel) Conference in Queenstown, Laura Houldsworth and Todd Lacey of Booking.com sat down with Karryon’s Matt Leedham to discuss the connected trip, the trust gap between AI and your credit card, and the opportunities as the business of travel distribution continues to reinvent itself.
It’s the morning after the conference, and we’re sitting in the sun-filled boardroom at Kamana Lakehouse, gazing out over a sparkling Lake Whakatipu and beyond to the snow-capped Remarkables mountain range.
Once a winter-only ski town, Queenstown Tāhuna now welcomes close to three million visitors a year. Not long ago, most of that traffic landed in one four-month burst. But not any more. Today, the Southern Alps region’s culinary offerings, wine, cycling, adventure, and fast-growing wellness scene have made it an all-year-round destination.
Netflix is even in town right now, filming New Zealand’s first locally commissioned drama series, aptly named “Queenstown.” Stand by for the next incoming visitor spike.
It was there, on stage at the inaugural WIT Queenstown conference, that Booking.com’s Todd Lacey, a Kiwi himself and the company’s Regional Manager for Oceania and Korea based in Sydney, shared the real stat worth starting the discussion with: while a Booking.com survey found 63 per cent of travellers will likely use AI for their 2026 travel, only three per cent still trust it enough to transact with their credit card.
That’s ninety-seven people in every hundred who aren’t confident enough to pay for their travel yet, using AI. Personally, I’m one of them.
Karryon covered similar Booking.com research last year: AI had already beaten colleagues and influencers at travel discovery and inspiration, even as outright trust in what it said lagged well behind.
That’s the gap Lacey thinks Booking can begin to close: “We can use AI to create inspiration,” he says, “but when it comes to the actual nuts and bolts of clicking the button, that’s where a company like Booking.com can play. That’s the trust and protection customers need most,” he says.
Laura Houldsworth, Booking’s Managing Director for Asia Pacific, based in Singapore, agrees.
“Who do you call if something goes wrong?” she asks, referring to handing your credit card to a chatbot. “They don’t have a hotline number.”
Every AI-first tool will have to answer that.
How does Booking.com actually earn trust?
Behind the scenes, Lacey says trust on Booking.com is engineered at scale: marketing, content moderation, verified reviews, and uploaded guest photos that catch any of the estimated 28 million listings’ images shot years ago that have not been updated or could be gen-AI-enhanced.
While Genius, Booking.com’s rewards program, has mostly focused on accommodation to date, Lacey says it’s being expanded to include flights, car hire and dining to drive greater brand loyalty.
The sequencing tracks Booking’s own 2026 travel trends research: leisure travellers trust AI most with restaurant bookings or excursion tickets, 38% each, ahead of hotels at 35% and flights at 32%. Dining and experiences, in other words, are the easier sell.
What’s changed in Booking’s long-running connected trip vision?
The day before, on the OTA Next Frontier panel at the WIT conference, Lacey had laid out the same vision Booking has chased for years: stitching flights, cars, dining and attractions into one connected trip. What’s changing now, says Lacey, is the plumbing thanks to agentic AI.
“If your flight down to Queenstown gets cancelled or modified,” he told the panel, “Our technology should be able to detect that automatically, and tell the taxi to arrive an hour later.
“It should automatically suggest an alternative restaurant because we know you’re vegan and that restaurant’s going to close by the time you arrive, all before the traveller even asks,” he says.
“It looks really simple on the surface, right?” he said. “It sounds really straightforward. It is absolutely not.” That’s why it’s taken this long.
Where are APAC travellers going right now?
Moving on to trends, Houldsworth says many travellers are currently looking closer to home. “People who may have traditionally gone further for longer are now travelling shorter distances for shorter periods,” she says.
Global demand has held up through Middle East disruption, fuel prices and a wobblier cost of living, but the radius has shrunk: Asia travel is growing at a high single-digit clip, she says, with intra-regional in low double digits.
“Travellers are just staying closer to home,” she says, “and that’s a trend that’s happening globally, not just here. [in AU/NZ]”
For example, Air New Zealand’s new Brisbane route lifted east-coast capacity to Queenstown by 40 per cent this winter, and Jetstar has since added its own direct Brisbane service, both chasing the shorter-haul demand Houldsworth describes.
What role do travel advisors still play as Booking expands?
Lacey doesn’t treat the channel as an afterthought. “They play an important role, especially in complicated trips,” he says, citing the choice a good advisor brings to a layered itinerary and Booking.com’s own advisor and business-booker programmes.
There’s no dedicated growth push behind the program right now, but Lacey expects the connected trip expansion to create more reasons for advisors to plug in.
Houldsworth points specifically to luxury, where curated, one-of-a-kind trips are for those who earn their place through a trusted human expert. The talent entering the profession is broadening, not replacing it: recruits from luxury retail and influencer backgrounds are joining advisors who’ve built careers on the trade.
What’s Booking’s bet for the next twenty years?
The theme of the Conference had been forecasting the next twenty years in travel, so I asked Lacey and Houldsworth for their one bet on where it might land.
Lacey’s is hyper-personalisation: knowing where you want to go before you know it yourself.
Houldsworth’s answer carried more weight. Her bet is AI too, but aimed at a different problem: using it to support the dispersal of travellers and spending, so growth doesn’t keep landing on the same handful of hotspots while everywhere else misses out.
“As travel gets easier, we can see over tourism as a potential outcome,” she says. “So while making it easier, I think we have an obligation to do more than just that.”
Travel distribution is already moving faster than it has in a decade, and the whole industry is grappling with the same trust question Lacey and Houldsworth just answered.
That’s not just a Booking.com problem. That’s everyone’s, right now.
Matt Leedham attended WIT Queenstown as a guest of Booking.com
