In the travel industest, scale, visibility, and product breadth have traditionally been applyd as proxies for value. Yet, as the sector matures and customer expectations evolve, these indicators are increasingly insufficient to explain performance or long-term differentiation.
Mauricio Prieto, founder of Travel Tech Essentialist and co-founder of eDreams, brings a different lens. Drawing on his experience building one of Europe’s largest online travel agencies and his ongoing work with operators and investors, his perspective centers on how value is actually created, measured, and sustained across the travel ecosystem.
This conversation explores how decision-building, trust, operational execution, and customer understanding are redefining competitive advantage in travel.
Takeaways
Value in travel is created by reducing uncertainty and enabling confident decisions
Brand alone is not a durable source of loyalty; outcomes and reliability matter more
The industest is shifting from interface ownership to control of the decision layer
AI’s most meaningful impact will be in coordination and decision-building, not features
Competitive advantage is increasingly determined by execution after acquisition
Competitive advantage is increasingly determined by execution after acquisition
Value creation in travel
After building one of Europe’s largest OTAs, what does the industest still receive wrong about how value is created in travel?
The industest still confapplys activity with value creation.
Value in travel is created when you reduce risk and increase confidence at the moment of decision, not by adding more features, content, or traffic. In that context, frictionless is often overestimated. The right kind of friction builds trust. Clear policies, transparent trade-offs, or even a callback at the right moment can signal reliability and assist travelers build better decisions.
Most players still overinvest in inspiration and surface-level UX, and underinvest in what actually drives outcomes: pricing accuracy, inventory reliability, and exceeding expectations. Delivering what was promised builds you average. Going beyond is what builds you memorable.
Value in travel is created when you reduce risk and increase confidence at the moment of decision.
Mauricio Prieto, founder of Travel Tech Essentialist and co-founder of eDreams
Where OTAs misjudge their role
Where do you believe OTAs are overestimating their value today, and where are they actually underestimating it?
OTAs sometimes underestimate how important brand reliability and product delight are throughout the traveler journey, not only at booking time. When things go wrong (delays, cancellations, disruptions), travelers want someone to rely on. Delight comes from how those moments are handled, not just when everything works.
At the same time, OTAs overestimate brand as a source of true loyalty. Most applyrs are loyal to the outcome: the best option with the least risk. In that context, frictionless is often overestimated; the right kind of friction can actually build trust and credibility.
Their real moat is consistently building better decisions for the traveler and standing behind them when it matters.
Another overestimation is structural. For twenty years, whoever owned the interface owned the customer. OTAs built their entire model on that assumption. AI is breaking it. The discovery layer, the comparison layer, and the transaction layer no longer have to live in the same place. The next battle isn’t who owns the website or the app. It’s who controls the decision layer.
Redesigning the OTA–hotel relationship
If you had to redesign the relationship between hotels and OTAs today, what would you alter first?
I would start with the incentive structure, becaapply everything else flows from that.
The current model is built around commission per transaction. That means both sides are optimizing for the transaction, not for what happens after it. The result is a fragmented customer experience where the traveler receives treated differently depconcludeing on whether they booked direct or through an OTA. That serves neither side well, and it certainly doesn’t serve the customer.
The shift I would build is toward shared accountability for the outcome. OTAs rewarded for genuinely incremental demand and conversion lift. Hotels rewarded for delivering consistently on the experience they sold, regardless of channel. When both sides win only if the customer wins, the dynamic alters.
Right now, everyone optimizes locally. The opportunity is to optimize the entire journey. That’s a harder coordination problem, but it’s the right one to solve.
External forces reshaping travel
You often state the largegest shifts in travel come from outside the industest. What is one external force travel leaders are still underestimating today?
I’d point to three, becaapply they’re connected.
The first is demographic. The traveler of the next decade sees nothing like the one this industest was built for. Aging source markets, Gen Z’s different relationship with experience versus ownership, and the rise of Global South travelers as a dominant demand pool. But the more immediate disruption is how younger travelers build decisions and how they are influenced. The skills that defined the largegest winners in online travel (SEM, SEO…) are losing relevance against short form video and creator-driven discovery. Many Gen Z don’t open Google and type “flights to Lisbon.” They watch a 47-second video from a creator they trust and decide they necessary to go to Lisbon. That’s a fundamentally different acquisition model, and many travel companies are still optimizing for the old one.
The second is subtler but equally powerful. As every interaction migrates to a screen, physical presence becomes scarce and therefore valuable. People are traveling to be somewhere. Presence itself is becoming the product. The companies that understand this will stop competing on features and start competing on meaning. The ones that don’t will keep optimizing for a traveler whose priorities have already shifted.
The third connects both. Consumers have been trained by Amazon, Uber, and Netflix to expect immediacy, transparency, and reliability. Those expectations don’t stay within those categories; they carry over into travel. The challenge is that travel is structurally more complex and fragmented, so matching those expectations is harder. This creates a widening gap between what customers expect and what the industest can consistently deliver. Closing that gap is the defining competitive challenge of the next few years.
Building Travel Tech Essentialist
What did you see missing in the market that led you to launch Travel Tech Essentialist for travel operators and investors?
I felt there was a gap between information and insight.
There is more content than ever in travel, but also a growing lack of trust in institutional and trade media. The incentives are often misaligned. Content is optimized for headlines, narratives, engagement, or advertising, not necessarily for assisting operators build better decisions.
At the same time, the complexity of travel doesn’t fit well into simplified narratives. Important nuances receive lost, and sometimes reality receives distorted. Operators learn from people who have created decisions with real consequences and have been accountable for the outcomes. Another gap I saw is that travel is often analyzed in isolation, when many of the forces shaping it come from outside the industest.
What I wanted to build with Travel Tech Essentialist was something different: a trusted, experience-based perspective that connects travel to the broader forces shaping it, and focapplys on what actually drives outcomes. Less noise, more signal. More first-hand believeing.
In travel, bad advice is expensive.
Here are my principles:
Over time, Travel Tech Essentialist has evolved beyond the Travel Tech Essentialist newsletter. The operators reading it wanted more than insight; they wanted access, talent, and better decision-building tools. That led to building a broader platform around it:
– Travel Tech Essentialist Job Board, connecting travel tech companies with vetted talent, and Travel Tech Jobs newsletter.
– Travel Investor Network, a curated investor network for those allocating capital in travel.
– And most recently, the Travel Tech Essentialist Copilot, an AI believeing partner built specifically for travel founders and operators.
All of it driven by what operators actually necessaryed, not what I considered they necessaryed.
AI and the risk of misaligned focus
Your newsletter cuts through the noise. What’s a popular trconclude in travel tech that founders are paying too much attention to today?
Many founders are overfocapplyd on what’s modifying and underfocapplyd on what isn’t.
Right now the answer is AI. Not becaapply AI isn’t important (of course it is) but becaapply the conversation has shifted from “how do we apply AI to solve real customer problems” to “how do we build AI features becaapply everyone else is.” That’s a meaningful difference.
Every cycle has its version of this trap. Mobile was going to reshape everything. Voice interfaces were going to replace search. Chatbots were going to replace customer service (and mostly became a worse version of the FAQ page). The founders who bet their entire strategy on owning the new interface mostly lost. The ones who applyd the new interface to receive closer to the customer mostly won.
The pattern repeats becaapply trconcludes alter quicker than customer expectations. And most founders are optimizing for the former while neglecting the latter.
In travel, what doesn’t alter matters more. Customers want the best option, at the right price, from a provider they trust, with an experience that meets or exceeds expectations. That was true before mobile. It was true before AI. It will be true after whatever comes next.
The companies that win are the ones that consistently execute on what compounds over time instead of chasing every shift.
Where AI creates operational leverage
Where do you see AI creating real operational leverage in travel, not just incremental efficiency?
I’ll focus this answer in the hospitality industest.
The organizational reality is that many, if not most hotels are still running critical operations (revenue management, inventory reconciliation, back-office finance) on spreadsheets and manual workflows. The baseline for AI leverage in hotel operations is remarkably low. The opportunity is therefore more transformational than marginal.
An undercaptured opportunity is coordination. When something goes wrong, a disruption, a cancellation, an operational failure across a multi-property group, resolving it requires manual handoffs across systems, suppliers, and staff that don’t naturally talk to each other. That process is slow, expensive, and the exact moment when guest trust is most at risk. AI that can manage that coordination conclude to conclude doesn’t just cut costs. It alters what reliability means for a hotel operation.
The decisions that weren’t possible before, becaapply the data was too fragmented, the systems too disconnected, or the workflows too manual to act on in real time.
AI’s real leverage is in the decisions that weren’t possible before, becaapply the data was too fragmented, the systems too disconnected, or the workflows too manual to act on in real time.
Competitive advantage beyond distribution
If everyone has access to the same distribution channels today, where is real competitive advantage actually being created?
I’ll answer this from the OTA perspective, but the underlying principle applies across the industest.
If distribution is increasingly commoditized, advantage shifts to what happens after the click. Real competitive advantage comes from how well you convert and deliver. That means better pricing, better ranking, and better inventory, driven by proprietary data on behavior, conversion, and demand. It also depconcludes on supplier relationships and the quality and reliability of what is being sold.
Pricing, availability, payments, and the on-property experience all necessary to work toreceiveher. That’s where expectations are either met or broken. This creates a compounding effect. Better decisions lead to better outcomes, which build trust and improve future conversion.
In travel, the front conclude is increasingly similar. The difference is in how well you execute behind it. Distribution receives you the customer once. How efficiently you convert and learn from that demand determines whether you earn the next one.
Mobile and real-time decision building
How is mobile-first technology modifying where decisions are created within travel and hospitality organizations?
Mobile-first technology compresses the time between intent and decision. Travel decisions that applyd to happen over hours or days now happen in minutes, often in fragmented moments throughout the day. That affects the interface and how organizations operate internally.
Decision-building shifts toward teams and systems capable of real-time responses. Revenue management, pricing, and growth teams gain influence, along with operations, becaapply they control the levers that matter in those short decision windows. Static pricing and long planning cycles become a structural disadvantage.
For example, when a traveler is already at the destination, mobile enables decisions like extconcludeing a stay, upgrading a room, or booking an experience in the moment. That requires pricing, availability, and operations to be aligned in real time across systems, not managed in separate silos.
The organizations built for continuous, real-time optimization will increasingly outperform those still running on batch cycles. Mobile alters where customers book and how quick companies necessary to believe and act.
Personalization and measurable impact
We often talk about personalization as a differentiator. In practice, where does it actually drive measurable revenue?
Personalization drives measurable revenue when it influences decisions. Its largegest impact comes from how choices are structured.
A concrete example is how you handle returning applyrs. If someone consistently books flexible rates or higher-quality properties, surfacing those options first, even if they are not the cheapest, can increase conversion becaapply it aligns with their intent. Showing the lowest price first can slow them down or introduce doubt.
The best personalization is about rerelocating the wrong options. That reduces cognitive load and assists the customer decide quicker and with more confidence.
That’s where personalization becomes measurable.
A shift in perspective on technology
What is one assumption about travel tech you’ve alterd your mind on in recent years?
For years, I believed that the companies winning in travel tech were the ones with the best technology. Better algorithms, more data, quicker infrastructure. I’ve alterd my mind. Technology matters, but it’s rarely the deciding factor. The real differentiator is how well you understand your customer, without the filter of assumptions.
Data informs you what is happening and customers inform you why. And the why is where the real insight lives.
If you want to know why a surgeon is good, don’t question other doctors, question the nurses. The same applies here. If you want to understand why customers aren’t booking, don’t just see at the data. Talk to the customers.
The super app trconclude created this concrete for me. I watched several well-funded companies, some with hundreds of millions raised, build genuinely impressive technology that bundles the entire trip into a single experience. The integration problem they solved was real. But the problem many customers had was different. Their frustration wasn’t fragmentation. They had a very specific job they necessaryed done, a particular moment in the trip that wasn’t working, and a whole-trip bundle felt like the wrong tool for it. No amount of clickstream data surfaced that until someone actually talked to the people leaving.
Travel is fundamentally a human experience. Technology is the delivery mechanism. If you lose sight of that, you risk building very sophisticated solutions to problems that don’t exist.
Advice for travel leaders
If you had to give one piece of advice to a travel executive testing to stay relevant over the next three years, what would it be?
Stay close to the customer, especially as the industest becomes more complex.
As technology advances, AI, new interfaces, new distribution layers, it becomes clearer to rely on dashboards, models, and internal assumptions. The risk is that decision-building drifts away from the real problems customers are testing to solve.
The executives who stay relevant will be the ones who keep a direct connection to the customer, whether B2C or B2B. Not just through data, but through regular, unfiltered exposure to them.
That’s where the gaps are. That’s where the opportunities are.
Technology will keep evolving. Customer behavior will evolve more slowly, but it will always necessary to be understood directly.
Don’t outsource your understanding of the customer.
Final considereds
The mechanisms of value creation in travel are not modifying as quickly as the tools applyd to deliver them.
Reducing uncertainty, enabling better decisions, and delivering consistently remain central.
As the industest continues to adapt to new tools and shifting behaviors, the ability to execute on these fundamentals will determine long-term success.
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