EasyJet holidays boss Garry Wilson has dismissed fears increased use of AI for holiday searches will take business away or disrupt the relationship between consumers and travel brands.
Speaking at World Travel Market 2026, Wilson said consumers would still be able to find the tour operator’s holidays because it ‘owns the content’.
He said he was confident easyJet holidays’ content would still appear on AI searches through chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude even if consumers did not initiate their search on the operator’s own website.
“It’s something that we are pretty confident about; where you are the content owner, actually you have an advantage,” he said.
Giving Egypt as an example, he said: “If a customer says, “I’d like to go to Egypt from the UK,” we have more flying from the UK than anyone, and AI can find that. So if they’re looking for recommendations, we will naturally come back [on searches].”
He added: “We will naturally come very high up … because of the brand that we have, and the capacity that we have.
“I think the meaningful thing for us is to think about how we can display the content in a way that’s attributed back to easyJet holidays and how we work with those platforms, or try to understand those platforms, in a way where actually the search becomes a natural search in the same way that Google has become now.”
But he insisted: “As long as you understand what’s important to customers when they’re searching, and you’re present there, then AI will find you through those searches.”
Wilson also downplayed the likelihood of AI changing the company’s relationship with its customers, provided operators differentiate themselves.
He credited easyJet hoildays’ “unbeatable prices” as its differentiator and for driving algorithms to ensure its brand appears in web searches.
“Whenever you’re searching for a holiday within a Mediterranean destination through a hotel that we feature, we will be the best value out of anyone,” he said.
Wilson added that the company was “absolutely invested” in AI as both an airline and tour operator and had used it from “quite early on” in its customer interactions to answer straightforward questions and free up call centre staff for more complex enquiries.
He noted: “I think one of the mistakes maybe a lot of businesses at the moment are making with AI is is you think AI needs to do everything.
“Yes, you need some very very powerful AI agents, you know, to do some very complex things. But a lot of other stuff can be done through automation or through much less sophisticated AI.”
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