Travel Search Costs and How AI Impacts The Economics
Skift Data + AI Summit: June 3 in NYC. Register now and view the agenda.Kiruba Shankar wanted just one airline ticket. To find it, he pointed Claude Code at the Etihad Airways website and pulled 881,076 fare options: every date in a month-long range, every stopover, every combination across four routes.
The problem: Searches cost money. Travel search is not like loading a static webpage. It often checks live rates, availability, rules, and bundles before returning an offer.
“[I] was just a user who outsourced a job to AI to find the best option,” Shankar, an insurtech founder, told Skift after posting about his search on LinkedIn.
Ten to 20 searches can go into a single trip, but the booking makes all that looking worthwhile. If there’s no conversion, the look-to-book ratio, or L2B, gets out of whack. With AI capable of hundreds of thousands of searches within moments, the economics break down fast.
It’s not just about whether AI
