A new survey suggests travellers are happy to let artificial intelligence do the tedious bits of travel — but they still want the fun parts to themselves.

Hospitality tech company Mews polled 3,250 travellers across France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US in July, and the results draw a clear line between tasks people will delegate and tasks they won't. Topping the willingness list: 63% would let AI watch hotel room rates and flag price drops, and 56% would use it as a real-time translator. Summarising reviews (56%) and recommending rates (57%) also scored well.

Planning, though, is another matter. Only 44% would hand over itinerary building, and just 46% are keen on AI handling check-in, check-out or an entire stay plan. Personalising the hotel room itself appealed to a mere 41% — and British travellers were the coolest on this front, with only 30% rating in-stay personalisation as important, versus a 40% average.

Data privacy shapes comfort levels too. People are far happier when AI draws on information they've deliberately shared — stated preferences (61%) or past hotel stays (56%) — than on behaviour tracked around the web (43%) or scraped from social media (34%). Americans were the most relaxed about hotels using their stay history (63%), while Spaniards demanded transparency: 72% said they'd use AI services more if they had more control over their personal data.

The findings complicate earlier research suggesting AI trip planning is booming — a prior study found 54% of US travellers had already used AI to plan a trip, and 75% intend to. The Mews survey hints at why both can be true: people may consult AI while planning, but that doesn't mean they want it making the decisions. There are regional enthusiasm gaps, too. Spain showed the most positive attitude toward AI overall (58%), Italians broadly expect hotels to offer digital check-in (58%), and no country was keen to let AI manage things once they'd actually arrived.

Mews' chief product and technology officer Josef Starýchfojtů put it plainly: get the balance wrong and even good AI feels intrusive. His argument for hotels is that offloading repetitive admin to software frees staff to do the things machines can't — personal attention and genuine human interaction.

For anyone booking a holiday, the takeaway is practical: AI is genuinely useful as a price-watcher, translator and review-distiller, and there's no shame in using it for exactly that while keeping the itinerary in your own hands. For the hotel industry, the message is that guests want tech that stays in its lane — helpful before arrival, discreet during the stay, and upfront about what data it's using.