In phases, never big-bang. Wrap the existing system in an API layer, migrate one function at a time — search, then booking, then payments — run old and new in parallel through a low season, and decommission only when the new stack has taken full load. Travel executives’ single biggest stated concern is disruption from legacy technology (Skift Research, 2023), which is why Knight Li Group plans migrations around the booking calendar, not around the software.

It’s worth it — and the industry has already voted: 83% of travel businesses now use generative AI in some capacity, and it is the sector’s #1 investment priority for the next 12–18 months (Phocuswright, 2026). For smaller operators the paybacks are practical: customer-service automation, itinerary drafting, content production. Knight Li Group helps travel companies pick the AI uses that pay back first — audit before build.

Because AI assistants only recommend what they can read and verify. 86% of AI citations come from brand-managed sources — chiefly a company’s own website and listings (Yext, 2025) — so a site built for Google-era SEO, or content locked inside a booking engine, is invisible to them. Plain-language pages, structured data and consistent company details fix it. Knight Li Group audits exactly this gap for travel businesses.

Yes, and the growth is steep: AI-sourced traffic to travel websites rose 194% year on year (Adobe Analytics, May 2026), and 25% of US travellers used generative AI for trip planning in 2026, up from 15% the year before (Deloitte, 2026). Actual AI-completed bookings are still under 1% — it is a compounding channel, not yet a primary one. The firms structuring their content for it now are the ones assistants will recommend as it grows.

Buy for solved problems — payments, channel management, CRM. Build only where your business genuinely differentiates: packaging, pricing, customer experience. And integrate rather than replace wherever an existing system still earns its keep. Knight Li Group is vendor-neutral: its audit maps what to keep, integrate, buy and build, each with a fixed quote per phase.

Make direct booking the easiest path: a fast site, transparent pricing, reviews on the page, and systematic follow-up on abandoned quotes and enquiries. Then treat OTAs as paid marketing you convert to direct on the second booking, with email and loyalty doing the conversion work. Most operators don’t need more traffic — they need to stop paying commission on demand they could own, and Knight Li Group builds that direct-booking path for travel operators.

A scoped audit comes first and is fixed-price; implementation is then quoted fixed, per phase, before anything starts. Knight Li Group engagements typically run from around £10k for a focused integration to £250k+ for full platform modernisation and custom solutions — and the audit tells you which end of that range your business is actually at before you commit to any of it.

Make your content readable and verifiable by machines: plain-language pages for each product and destination, FAQ and Organization structured data, consistent company details everywhere, and statistics or specifics an assistant can quote — an approach shown to lift AI-answer visibility by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). Knight Li Group builds this generative-engine optimisation into every travel engagement.

Yes, for the early stages. 61% of US and UK travellers regularly use AI in the early planning stages before consulting other sources, but 95% verify what the AI tells them elsewhere before acting on it.¹ The check lands on the travel business’s own website, reviews and booking pages. Knight Li Group, a UK consultancy for travel and small businesses, makes sure those pages confirm what the assistant said.