The end of endless scrolling: why travellers are trading multiple browser tabs for one confident answer

Your customers stopped searching. Are you even visible?

Planning a trip should feel like excitement. But most of the time, it feels like work. What starts as an idea and a simple question (let's get away for the long weekend) ends in hours of endless scrolling.

Switching between TripAdvisor tabs. Getting lost on Google Maps. Finding yourself in a rabbit hole of blog posts promising "insider tips." And somehow, you're further from a decision than when you started.

This isn't travel planning; it's information warfare, and travellers are exhausted.

The paradox of infinite choice

The internet promised us unlimited options. What it delivered was unlimited overwhelm. Then social search compounded the problem. Research shows that 59.9% of people now question the authenticity of online content.

The result is decision paralysis masquerading as planning. The experience has confused having more information with having better information.

From search to curation

Something fundamental has shifted in how people approach travel planning. Instead of searching, they're curating.

Old way: Type "best hotels Barcelona" → open 20+ tabs → compare prices → read hundreds of reviews → check maps → start over because you're still unsure

New way: "I'm looking for a boutique hotel in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. We love architecture and local food scenes, want to be walkable to culture but away from Ramblas crowds. Budget around €200/night. What fits us?"

The difference isn't just efficiency. It's intent, and conversational AI delivers it.

Why AI curation actually works

Generative AI platforms have fundamentally changed what "search" means. They don't just retrieve information; they synthesise it.

When you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude for travel recommendations, the AI draws from multiple sources simultaneously, understands context and nuance, weighs trade-offs, and provides reasoned recommendations with explanations, not just ranked lists.

More importantly, it invites dialogue. Don't like the first suggestion? Say why. Want to adjust budget? Ask. This isn't a search engine serving pages. It's a knowledgeable friend helping you think through options.

The rise of the curation economy

According to McKinsey research, more than 90% of customers report confidence in travel information received through generative AI. That's remarkable trust for technology barely two years old in mainstream use.

But the real shift isn't trust; it's behaviour, and as trust and satisfaction increase, these new behaviours become the baseline.

Travellers are writing longer, richer queries than they ever typed into Google. They're sharing constraints, values, past experiences, and specific contexts. A typical AI travel prompt might include dietary restrictions, travel pace preferences, budget flexibility, and deal-breakers they'd never mention in a keyword search.

This depth of input enables depth of output. AI doesn't just return hotels; it curates narratives.

The old model was: throw yourself into the internet and hope you emerge with a good plan. The new model is: express what matters, and let AI compress the chaos into clarity.

But here's the critical shift for travel brands: AI can only recommend what it knows about. If your content isn't accessible to these platforms, you're not part of the curation. You're simply not considered.

What this means for how we travel

This shift doesn't just save time. It's changing the quality of decisions we make. When planning feels less like work, travellers explore more adventurously, book with more confidence, and focus on experiences over logistics.

We're more connected than ever, yet we increasingly want technology to disappear. We don't want less capability. We want less friction. When AI handles the cognitive load of comparing options, we're free to imagine the trip itself.

What comes next

Right now, most travellers still use AI as a starting point, generating ideas they verify elsewhere. But behaviour is shifting rapidly. As AI platforms integrate booking capabilities and trust deepens, we're likely to see the need to "verify" start to diminish.

Here's what that means for travel brands: when a traveller asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude "where should I stay in Barcelona?", the AI synthesises its response from the information it can access. If your property isn't part of that synthesis - if your content isn't structured for AI to understand, your reviews aren't visible in the sources AI draws from, your unique value isn't represented in the data - you simply don't exist in that conversation.

You're not losing visibility. You're invisible at the exact moment decisions are being made.

In the curation economy, invisibility is obsolescence.

The curation economy is already here. And it's rewriting the rules of discovery.

Every day, thousands of travellers are asking AI where to stay, what to do, where to eat. The brands AI recommends get considered, while the ones it doesn't know about simply don't exist in those conversations.

This isn't a future problem. It's happening right now. The question isn't whether AI curation matters. It's whether your brand is visible when travellers ask.

At MSQ DX, we're helping travel and hospitality leaders ensure their properties, experiences, and narratives show up in the conversations that matter - before their competitors do.

Discover how to stay visible in an AI-first world →