Trust and prosperity in agentic commerce: the tour operator as a digital guarantor

2026-10-23 Federico Ciuccarelli

Trust and prosperity in agentic commerce: the tour operator as a digital guarantor

Artificial intelligence agents promise to search, negotiate, and book on our behalf. But history shows that no technology achieves widespread adoption until it is supported by an infrastructure of guarantees: this happened with e-commerce, and it is now happening with agentic commerce. The difference is that we are no longer delegating a simple search, but a decision – and this requires an unprecedented level of trust, made up of two components: human trust, rooted in brand and reputation, and technical trust, based on the security and traceability of agents. Applied to tourism – a sector with high emotional and economic stakes – this framework reveals a clear opportunity for tour operators: thanks to the experience they have built in the physical world, they already possess the assets needed to become the “trust brokers” of the digital age. The window of opportunity, however, is narrow.

n the early 1990s, entering your credit card details on a website seemed like a gamble. Yet in less than a decade, e-commerce became one of the pillars of global trade. What changed? Not the technology, which had already been available for some time, but the trust infrastructure built around it: secure payments, verified reviews, buyer protection, shared rules. It was an institutional innovation before it was a digital one.

Today, we are witnessing a similar but more radical transformation. With agentic commerce, AI agents will not simply search for information: they will negotiate terms, make bookings, and pay on our behalf. Compared with traditional e-commerce, we are no longer delegating a search, but a decision. And delegation requires more trust, not less. As early as the 1970s, Kenneth Arrow observed that trust acts as a lubricant for social systems: the same principle applies to the agents to which we will entrust the organization and purchase of our holidays.

The dual trust of the agentic age

It is useful to distinguish between two dimensions of trust. The first is human trust: built over time through a brand, a credible regulatory framework, and a reputation that penalizes those who fail to deliver. It is the kind of trust that Francis Fukuyama associated with the “radius” within which cooperation extends beyond the family circle: the wider that radius, the deeper markets can become.

The second is technical trust, specific to the age of AI agents: knowing that an agent truly acts according to our intentions, that it cannot be manipulated, that every action leaves a verifiable trace, and that delegation can be revoked. An AI that recommends the perfect holiday is not enough: we need to know who is accountable when something goes wrong. The industry is taking its first steps with protocols such as Google’s AP2, which authenticate agents and their spending mandates. This is where technologies such as blockchain can play a meaningful role: not as a substitute for trust, but as a ledger that makes mandates and decisions verifiable.

The two dimensions must grow together: a technically flawless agent without institutional guarantees will not be adopted; a long-established brand without delegation protocols will not be able to scale. This balance produces an S-shaped adoption curve, the same pattern observed with e-commerce: in the early stages, technology grows slowly because trust is insufficient, then it crosses a critical threshold and accelerates.

In Figure 1, the logistic S-curve identifies three regimes of progressive delegation:

Figure 1 – The trust curve in travel agentic commerce. The logistic shape shows that trust does not generate value linearly, but through critical thresholds.

Tourism and the three regimes of delegation

Tourism is one of the most demanding testing grounds: a trip is not a substitutable commodity. It involves time, expectations, emotions, often a significant financial investment, and a combination of different suppliers. Applying the trust curve reveals three distinct regimes.

At low levels of trust, the agent acts as a conversational search engine: it compares and recommends, but payment is not delegated. At medium levels of trust, the agent actually books within clearly defined boundaries – a predetermined budget, certified suppliers. This is the territory of the travel package, which is already a trust mechanism because it tells the traveler, “you don’t need to verify every supplier; I have already done that for you.” At high levels of trust, agents negotiate with one another – traveler, tour operator, hotel, carrier – assembling complex itineraries with dynamic rescheduling.

The tour operator as guarantor of the new digital trust

Tour operators have always performed a function of reducing uncertainty: selecting reliable suppliers, building solid agreements, and guaranteeing assistance. In the agentic age, this role evolves into that of a “trust broker”: an intermediary that transfers its own reliability to the new digital ecosystem. This is a textbook case of Fukuyama’s argument: an intermediary that expands the radius of trust far beyond the consumer’s personal circle. Its three traditional assets translate almost one-to-one into the agentic age [Figure 2].

Figure 2 – The tour operator: from certifier of human trust to certifier of agentic trust. The same role, a new language.

The tour operator’s assets translate into three functions: certifying the agents with which customers interact, making contracts available in machine-readable formats, and guaranteeing accountability even when the decision has been delegated to an AI – as it already does today, by law, through the joint liability established by EU package travel legislation. This is a tangible competitive advantage, but not an unlimited one: the window for translating it into the digital environment before major generalist web players do so can be measured in just a few years.

The Alpitour World case

At Alpitour World, Italy’s leading integrated tourism operator, this transition begins with a simple principle: technology only makes sense if it strengthens and transfers customer trust into the new digital ecosystem, rather than attempting to replace it with technical reliability alone. This means designing every AI application within an ethical framework from the outset, ensuring decision traceability and guaranteed human intervention in ambiguous situations – anticipating the transparency obligations becoming binding under the European AI Act in August 2026. It also means taking part in the debate on the accountability of digital agents: no single operator can write tomorrow’s standards alone, but an organization bringing the experience of millions of guaranteed journeys has every reason to contribute to defining them.

What is needed – and from whom

The next wave of digital competition will not be fought solely on the quality of algorithms, but on the ability to build this new layer of trust. For companies, this means investing in reliable data, interoperable systems, and governance that ensures human oversight at critical moments. For institutions, it means clarifying the rules governing the accountability of digital agents in good time, with tourism potentially serving as a pilot sector. For consumers, it means developing awareness of these new delegation tools: knowing when they are interacting with an agent, and how they can always return to a human interlocutor.

E-commerce demonstrated that those who build a market’s trust infrastructure ultimately capture the greatest share of its value. Tourism starts from a favorable position: it already has intermediaries whose credibility has been built over decades of relationships with travelers. As Arrow understood, trust cannot simply be bought: it is built, transferred, and institutionalized. The challenge now is to transform that historical trust into a new digital infrastructure.

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Federico Ciuccarelli is Chief Innovation & Technology Officer, Alpitour World

Photo iStock / Jian Fan

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