A Viral AI Bot Just Showed Travel What Frictionless Actually Means
Voice reading · ~2 min
There's a new AI assistant called Instinct that's making waves in Silicon Valley, and it's not another chatbotChatbotA chatbot is a program that converses with the guest by text or voice to solve questions or guide a booking. The old ones followed rigid scripts, today's use language models and sound natural. Done well it takes load... that sends you a link and hopes for the best. As Skift reports, Instinct can book and rebook an entire trip from a simple text thread. No apps, no forms, no 'please hold'. Just a conversation.
And that's exactly where most travel tech fails. We've spent years talking about frictionless booking, but the reality is that most hotel websites and apps still make you click through five screens to change a date. Instinct doesn't have screens. It just does it.
The lesson for hoteliers? Stop polishing the same old funnel and think about what your guest actually wants: to say 'change my reservation to next Friday' and have it happen. The technology exists. The question is whether hotels are bold enough to build around the conversation, not the interface.
Skift's take is spot on: talking about frictionless isn't the same as delivering it. The hotel that figures this out first wins the guest's loyalty. And the ones that don't? They'll be the ones asking why guests keep booking elsewhere.
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