A new report from Amperity reveals a widening gap between investment in artificial intelligence and actual operational readiness within the hospitality and airline industries.
The 2025 State of AI for Hotels & Airlines study underscores that while AI has become a strategic priority, many brands remain unprepared to deploy it directly in guest experiences. The report is based on an online survey of 800 U.S. hotel and airline professionals across executive, marketing, data and analytics, and IT and engineering roles, conducted in September 2025.
According to the report, only 35 percent of hotel and airline brands are currently using AI to enhance guest interactions, and just 12.5 percent acknowledge they are ready to scale those efforts across their organizations. Conversely, nearly all respondents—96 percent—plan to maintain or increase their AI investments over the coming year.
Overall, 80 percent of respondents indicated that AI is in use somewhere within their business, but most deployments are concentrated in marketing, sales and customer support functions rather than in operational or guest-facing contexts. This limited application points to what Amperity refers to as “shallow adoption,” where AI’s potential to improve service delivery and personalization remains largely untapped.
In addition, more than one-third of professionals surveyed said their organization offers no formal AI training. Data quality also remains a major barrier—58 percent of respondents reported that their customer data is fragmented or incomplete, restricting personalization and undermining the reliability of AI outputs.