A traveller tells an artificial intelligence assistant to book four days in Dubai on a $2,000 budget. The AI researches options, reserves flights and a hotel, hedges currency risk in real time, splits the cost with travel companions and optimises cashback on every transaction.
This is one example of how AI can change the financial side of travel, which has long been a source of anxiety for consumers.
“Travel is one of the most complex payment environments any consumer encounters,” says Daumantas Grigaravicius, head of Middle East at global payments platform Adyen. “A single trip can involve bookings, purchases and charges across multiple currencies, countries and systems.
“For most travellers, this complexity is invisible until something goes wrong: a card declined at checkout because a fraud rule was triggered by an unfamiliar market, a preferred payment method unavailable at the point of booking or a price displayed in a currency that adds hesitation at exactly the moment a purchase decision is being made.”
Across the travel industry, AI is being deployed against each of those friction points. Fraud detection, foreign exchange optimisation, real-time budget monitoring and personalised payment experiences are all being transformed by machine learning. The pace of that change was evident at Arabian Travel Market in Dubai this week, where payments technology drew significant attention on the show floor.
“AI is shifting travel payments from a reactive task to a proactive, automated background experience,” Abdulhamid Ahmed, founder and technical director of Halala Plus, a UAE-based fintech focused on travel payments, tells The National.
Travellers increasingly have AI doing that work automatically, rather than manually tracking spending across currencies. “Smart micro-budgeting engines analyse spending patterns on the fly,” he says. It alerts users before they overspend or dynamically sets aside micro-savings during their trips.
“It essentially acts as an automated financial co-pilot throughout the journey.”
Fraud prevention is one area where AI has already delivered measurable results. The travel sector has been particularly vulnerable to fraud, partly because legitimate and fraudulent transactions look almost identical, and static rule systems cannot reliably distinguish between them. Iata has historically estimated losses of at least $1 billion a year to payment fraud, Mr Grigaravicius says.
Adyen has replaced the static model with “dynamic identification”.
“Instead of relying on one-off identity checks that are increasingly easy to fake, our AI-driven risk engine looks at real behaviour over time – how customers and businesses actually transact – and uses that accumulated pattern as the verification layer. When a transaction deviates from a genuine customer's established behaviour, the system flags it; and when it fits, it passes,” he says.
The outcome is “both less fraud and fewer false declines”.
AI is also reshaping what happens before a card leaves a wallet. Mr Ahmed points to predictive hedging for individual travellers: platforms use AI to forecast currency fluctuations and advise users on the best time to pay a hotel bill or settle a large purchase. He also highlights the emergence of invisible checkout, where AI verifies identity biometrically and completes multicurrency payments without presenting a card.
At Arabian Travel Market in Dubai this week, Trip.com and Mastercard showcased AI travel assistant TripGenie. "[It] isn't simply an AI agent generating a list of places to visit,” says Siddharth Sudhakar, general manager for Mena at Trip.com. “It is fully connected to the Trip.com ecosystem, so it can help travellers compare options, manage bookings and more. It combines AI with our travel content, destination knowledge and real-time travel inventory to help travellers move from inspiration to a much more actionable plan.”
Mr Sudhakar frames what comes next as agentic commerce: AI that handles the full transaction loop. “We have been building towards this.”
For Mr Grigaravicius, this trajectory leads towards AI that manages an entire journey. “AI agents that can handle end-to-end traveller experiences – from discovery to booking to payment; these are tools that understand context, make decisions and have the autonomy to act on their own.”
That personalisation compounds with each interaction. “An agent that carries a traveller's booking history and past behaviour into every interaction can optimise across variables that would take a human considerable effort to co-ordinate – preferred airline alliances, specific payment methods, seat and room preferences, even dietary requirements,” he says.
It won’t take long for this to arrive in the UAE, says Mr Grigaravicius, as research by Salesforce found that 80 per cent of UAE organisations plan to use AI agents by 2027. The government has also announced plans to embed agentic AI across 50 per cent of its services and operations within the next two years.
For travellers, such tools “completely removes financial anxiety from travel”, says Mr Ahmed.
