Online travel agencies may emerge as the winners of the artificial intelligence transition in travel, according to Morgan Stanley.

The investment bank's call cuts against a widespread assumption in the trade: that AI-powered search and booking tools would disintermediate the OTAs by sending travelers straight to suppliers or to AI assistants that bypass the agency layer altogether. Morgan Stanley's analysts instead see the major online agencies as likely beneficiaries of the technology shift.

The thesis matters for anyone selling travel distribution. If the large OTAs convert AI-driven demand into bookings at scale, they would extend their grip on the intermediated segment of the market — the same segment that suppliers have spent years trying to reclaim through direct-booking campaigns and reduced commission exposure.

Morgan Stanley's position is an analyst projection, not a measured result. The firm has not yet published transaction data demonstrating AI-driven booking gains, and sellers of travel should treat the claim accordingly: as an investment-research argument about market positioning rather than a filing-backed performance number.

The report lands amid an industry-wide scramble to define who captures value when travelers research and book through AI interfaces. The unresolved questions are commercial ones: which players control the booking endpoint, who pays for AI-referred traffic, and how commission structures hold up when the path to purchase runs through a chat interface instead of a search results page.

For OTAs, the upside case rests on scale — large inventories, established booking infrastructure, and payment relationships that AI tools need in order to complete transactions. For suppliers, the risk is a re-intermediation that reverses years of direct-booking progress.

Watch for Morgan Stanley to follow the note with harder numbers on AI-attributed bookings, and for the big agencies' next quarterly filings to show whether AI traffic is converting into measurable revenue.