Frank Bosteels

Frank Bosteels speaks about travel technology with a mix of enthusiasm and grounded skepticism, and his central argument keeps returning to one point: the hype around AI in travel is misplaced because it ignores the underlying infrastructure that makes it work. His sharpest formulation of this is the line "een AI zonder data is eigenlijk een Porsche die in de garage staat zonder brandstof" ¹² — a Porsche in the garage without fuel. For Bosteels, data, not algorithms, is the real story in travel tech, and he points to Ghent as an unlikely hub for this work, noting "everything happens in Gent these days when it comes to technology" ¹² with reference to Lighthouse. He is emphatic that his industry is not threatened by this shift: "Wij zijn niet bang van AI. Wij denken dat hij een mooie opportuniteit biedt om onze job nog beter te doen" ¹².

At the same time, he is precise about the limits of what AI agents can currently do. They can handle simple, well-specified bookings, a fixed airline, a known hotel chain, set dates, but complex itineraries remain out of reach, and critically, the traveler still carries full liability if an AI-driven booking goes wrong ¹². This is a recurring theme in how he frames technology: it is a tool that extends human expertise rather than replaces it, and the risk it introduces is not evenly distributed.

Bosteels offers a clear explanation of how pricing logic in travel was inverted by low-cost carriers, and he treats this as one of the more important structural shifts in the industry. Instead of last-minute discounts, early booking becomes cheapest and prices climb as flights fill, because "iemand die nu boekt, die moet wel reizen, die heeft geen keuze en he is gonna pay whatever it takes" ¹². He frames this as a logic that has since spread far beyond budget airlines into hotels and legacy carriers via revenue management systems, and he connects it directly back to his data argument: these systems are only as good as the historical bookings and event calendars feeding them.

On demand and consumer behavior, Bosteels is confident that travel itself is recession-proof and boycott-proof in the aggregate, even when specific markets wobble. He notes a roughly 30% drop in US-bound bookings from Belgium since March tied to Trump-related boycotts, but downplays its significance since Europeans are a small share of US tourism compared to Canadians and South Americans, and he expects price drops from vacancy to eventually pull travelers back ¹². Underneath this sits his broader conviction that "reizen, daar gaan de mensen nooit van afzien. Dat is een elementaire behoefte. Dat is gelijk als eten en drinken" ¹² — travel, in his view, is a basic need on par with eating and drinking, immune to permanent suppression even if individual markets or years fluctuate.

On the shape of the travel agent profession, he rejects the narrative of decline in favor of reinvention. "Voor elke reisagent die stopt zijn er nog altijd meer nieuwe die beginnen" ¹, he says, but the new entrants look nothing like the old generalists: they are hyper-specialized around single destinations, niche activities like horse-riding trips, or specific demographics, selling expertise and full experiences rather than transactional bookings ¹². He extends this into a broader observation about how travelers choose trips at all, arguing that destination has stopped being the primary decision point for younger travelers, who now pick the activity, wellness, cooking, diving, digital detox, first and the place second ¹². This activity-first mentality, in his telling, has displaced the older bucket-list model of collecting countries.

Bosteels is also alert to the darker side of generative AI in marketing, describing how AI-generated destination images have led people to walk into travel agencies asking to book trips to fictional Cycladic-style towns that don't exist ¹². He treats this less as an isolated curiosity than as a natural extension of an industry that has always retouched promotional imagery, with the difference now being that entire places can be fabricated wholesale.

His concrete, practical advice follows the same logic as his structural analysis. On destination choice he offers a memorably blunt heuristic: "Waar moet je naartoe reizen? Ja, naar een plaats waar niemand naartoe wil" ¹, since the most sought-after place is by definition the most expensive. He extends this into seasonal reasoning, noting that climate change is pushing summer demand toward the Alps, Scandinavia and Scotland as travelers flee 45-degree heat elsewhere, while ski resorts falter in winter for lack of snow ¹. He is similarly skeptical of long-haul travel in summer specifically, pointing to monsoon season in Southeast Asia, early darkness in the southern hemisphere, and Tokyo's shared latitude with Marseille under 40-degree heat, concluding that everything most travelers need sits within a two to three hour flight radius of Belgium ¹². Even on the mechanics of flying itself he has a specific, technical observation: aircraft like the Airbus A350 measurably reduce jet lag through adaptive lighting synced to time zones and better cabin pressure regulation ¹². Across all of this, his throughline is consistent: technology and market mechanics have changed the rules of travel, but the fundamental human appetite for it, and the value of specialized human expertise in navigating it, have not.