Trip.com Group Chief Operating Officer Xing Xiong delivered a direct evaluation of the travel sector’s direction during the company’s Airline Global Conference in Amsterdam last week. His remarks highlighted AI as both a transformative tool and a competitive necessity for businesses unwilling to adapt. They also reflected the company’s expansion from a specialized international operator to one of the world’s largest online travel platforms, even as it handles war-related disruptions, AI advancements, and the underdeveloped corporate travel market.
Xiong opened by noting the industry’s post-pandemic rebound, which had remained steady until the Middle East conflict escalated in March. Year-over-year RPK growth (revenue passenger kilometers) then dropped sharply, with international travel already in negative territory by that point. April and May figures, still preliminary, were projected to show further declines. “I’m quite sure that number will be negative,” Xiong said. Yet he struck a note of cautious optimism: “We still believe this impact will be short-lived. We continue to believe in our industry and in people’s resilience.”
AI’s Evolution: From Chatbots to Agentic Systems
His discussion then focused on AI’s development, which he divided into clear stages. The end of 2022 saw the emergence of Large Language Models, enabling conversations indistinguishable from human interaction. 2023 became synonymous with ChatGPT, shaking up competitors like Google before the tech giant reclaimed dominance in 2025 through its Gemini models. These were backed by computing resources no rival could match. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude stood out for its agentic functions—AI systems capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks independently. “AI starts acting like agents on behalf of human beings,” Xiong explained. “AI is here to help me do complicated tasks that I cannot do before.”
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The most significant shift, in his view, was the arrival of what he termed the “harness”—the point where AI’s capabilities became widely accessible via open APIs. Cloud providers like AWS, Google, and Anthropic had transformed raw AI power into practical, affordable tools. This allowed businesses to integrate solutions without developing them from the ground up. “We finally see AI become something productive, extremely valuable, and beneficial to everyone, if you can catch up,” Xiong said. For companies still hesitating, the urgency was clear: “If your team has not yet reached the harness, challenge your technology teams. This is something you cannot afford to miss.”
Trip.com’s strategy with AI has been measured rather than experimental. The company has not invested billions in building proprietary models but instead leveraged existing solutions where they deliver results. Customer service automation has been its most successful application: post-booking support contacts have fallen from nearly 40% to just 7%. AI now handles refunds, itinerary adjustments, and even detects pricing errors, such as a $40,000 ticket incorrectly listed at $2,000, before airlines could identify them. “We had cases where airlines were very thankful for what we had done,” Xiong noted.
Practical AI Wins, And Where It Struggles
Analytics and operational intelligence have also seen adoption, though Trip Genie, the company’s AI-powered travel assistant, remains in development. Demonstrations showed voice-activated hotel searches and bookings, but Xiong acknowledged that discovery and inspiration, areas where AI could process unstructured data, still lagged. “The world is so diverse, and in the legacy world we were only able to work with structured data. AI is extremely good at digesting and reusing unstructured information, that creates a future for inspiration. We are still working on it.”
On agentic booking, where AI completes transactions independently, Xiong expressed caution. “AI’s accuracy is at best 98%,” he noted. “Would you trust a system with a 2% chance of failing at a critical moment, like missing a flight?” For high-stakes processes, near-flawless reliability is essential.
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Trip.com’s engineering teams have not been replaced by AI but rather enhanced. “On average, engineers now spend 10 to 15% of their time writing new code,” Xiong explained. The company has no plans to reduce headcount; instead, engineers are being redirected toward higher-value work.
NDC’s Backend Battle: Speed Over ‘New’ Labels
The discussion then shifted to NDC (New Distribution Capability), which Xiong avoided calling “new” by 2026. The primary challenge is scaling infrastructure to match AI-driven traffic growth. “Our backend capacity grows by 3 to 5% annually,” he said. Trip.com has already demonstrated a solution with 11 airlines live on its NDC platform, cutting response times from eight seconds to one and improving conversion rates.
Corporate travel emerged as the next major opportunity. The TMC (Travel Management Company) sector remains fragmented, with no single provider matching the scale of major OTAs. The technology required is complex, customization needs are high, and corporations wield significant bargaining power. However, AI is simplifying customization. Trip.biz, Trip.com’s TMC division, already ranks among the top five globally by transaction volume, though it accounts for just 5% of revenue.