Last week, I bought a tour from my own company through an AI agent. It included a scooter rental, a wine tasting in Valpolicella, a visit to a local salumeria, and lunch at a family-run restaurant.

And I mean bought, not booked. The moment I paid, every part of the tour was organized for me: the services were reserved with the individual partners, the itinerary was ready, and the complete experience was delivered to my phone.

I didn’t open GetYourGuide. I didn’t visit the Motoragazzi or DGtalguide website. I didn’t even open a browser. I simply talked to the AI agent through WhatsApp, in my own language, told it what I wanted, answered a few questions, and received a payment link.

I was born in Russia, where we have a saying: “A man won’t cross himself until thunder strikes.” In other words, people have a remarkable ability to ignore an approaching problem until it becomes impossible to ignore. In the travel industry, the thunder has been rolling for months. What happened to me last week made it very difficult to pretend not to hear it.

The most interesting part was not even the purchase itself. During our conversation, the agent told me that the same tour was more expensive on GetYourGuide than through DGtalguide. It also understood that GetYourGuide was selling a fixed package, while DGtalguide allowed the same experience to be configured around my needs. I could choose only the services I wanted and specify how many of each I needed.

In other words, the AI agent was no longer simply “finding a tour.” It was comparing different ways of buying the same underlying experience, understanding the differences between those offers, and choosing the one that made more sense for the customer.

For the past twenty years, OTAs have solved a very real problem. The travel market was fragmented. Thousands of local operators had websites of wildly different quality and structure, different booking tools — or no booking tools at all — different languages, different payment methods, and completely different ways of presenting their products. GetYourGuide, Viator and others put all of that behind one clean, familiar interface where customers could search, compare and pay without having to understand what was happening behind the scenes.

That convenience was extremely valuable, and operators often paid dearly for it — a cost that can put upward pressure on prices and make experiences less accessible.

Still, price is almost a side issue. The much more important point is this: for all the technology around it, an OTA is still a storefront for an experience created and delivered by someone else.

A very sophisticated, powerful and successful storefront, certainly. It can handle discovery, availability, booking, payment, reviews and customer support. What it usually does not contain is the experience itself.

The real product still lives somewhere inside the tour operator’s business.

And this is where DGtalguide is fundamentally different.

DGtalguide does not just sell the experience. It CONTAINS the experience.

A tour inside DGtalguide is not simply a page describing what the customer is buying. The platform contains the route, navigation, schedule, points of interest, content, instructions, warnings and all the individual services that make up the tour.

More importantly, DGtalguide can automatically reserve those services with the partners who provide them. A restaurant table, a winery visit, a tasting, a bike rental, a museum ticket, equipment rental, a ferry tickets, or any other service that forms part of the experience can become part of the same automated process.

With DGtalguide, payment triggers the organization of the experience itself. The required services are reserved, the relevant partners receive the reservation information, and the complete tour is delivered to the customer’s phone.

The gap between payment and the moment a fully organized tour is delivered to the customer is literally a second or two.

And that distinction becomes extremely important once AI agents enter the picture.

The AI agent is no longer just another source of traffic. On its own, it can become a new interface between the traveler and the tour operator. But when it connects to DGtalguide, it can become something more important: a direct interface to the experience itself.

For years, OTAs owned much of that customer-facing interface, and that was one of their greatest advantages.

Now the interface may belong to the AI agent.

And if the agent can go directly to the source, get more complete information, configure the experience more precisely and sometimes offer better value, then there is an uncomfortable but perfectly reasonable question:

Why should it automatically send the customer through an intermediary?

I don’t think GetYourGuide or Viator are going to disappear tomorrow. But something more important is changing. The era in which OTAs were the gateway between travelers and those who create and deliver experiences is ending in front of us.

The thunder has already struck. Now let’s see who got caught in the middle of a railroad track.