The next decade of travel won't be won by the biggest network, but by the smartest one
For a century, scale was the moat in travel. The next ten years will reward something else entirely, and most of the industry is built for the wrong era.
When I started writing this newsletter, I opened with a piece about how Brazil has one of the largest airport networks in the world and flies far less than it should. I have been thinking, lately, about why that gap exists, and I have come to believe it points at something much larger than Brazil, something that is about to reshape the entire economics of travel. The short version is this: for most of the history of this industry, the winners were the ones with the biggest network. I do not think that will be true for much longer.
Let me make the case for the old logic first, because it was correct for a long time, and understanding why it was correct is the key to seeing why it is ending.
Why scale was the moat
For roughly a century, travel was a scale business in the most literal sense. Value came from the size and reach of your physical and contractual network. An airline with more routes, more slots, more aircraft, and more interline agreements could serve more journeys than a smaller one, and that breadth compounded. A travel agency with more locations, more agents, and more supplier relationships could handle more clients across more destinations. A hotel chain with more properties in more cities had more to sell to any given corporate account. The moat was the network, and the network was physical: gates, planes, offices, contracts, bodies. Bigger genuinely meant better, because the constraint on serving a customer was the reach of your infrastructure, and infrastructure scaled with size.
This logic built the industry we have. It explains the megamergers, the global alliances, the consolidation of agencies into ever-larger TMCs. Everyone was racing to assemble the biggest network, because the biggest network won. And in the world that logic was built for, they were right to race.
But that world rested on an assumption that is quietly dissolving, and once you see the assumption, you see why the whole logic is about to invert.
The assumption that is dissolving
The assumption was that the hard part of travel was access: physically reaching the inventory, the route, the room, the seat. When access is the constraint, scale is the answer, because scale is how you maximize access. The biggest network reaches the most things.
Access is no longer the constraint. This is the shift that changes everything, and it has been creeping up for two decades. Through global distribution systems, through APIs, through the new direct-connect protocols the airlines themselves are pushing, the inventory of the world is increasingly reachable by anyone with the right connections into it. The seat that once required a particular agency’s particular relationship is now, more and more, visible and bookable through many channels at once. The room, the fare, the route: the raw access to them is commoditizing. And when access commoditizes, the value built on top of access erodes with it.
So if access is no longer scarce, what is? This is the question that decides the next decade, and the answer is the inverse of the old one.
What is scarce now
What is scarce now is not reach but intelligence: the ability to look at the vast, commoditized, overwhelming sea of available options and find the right one. Not the cheapest in a naive sense, not the first one a search returns, but the right one, the combination that is most economical and most compliant and best for the specific traveler and the specific trip, surfaced instantly, from a field of possibilities too large for any human to search.
This is a different kind of advantage, and it does not come from size. It comes from how well you can see and reason over the options that everyone can now reach. The moat is no longer the network. The moat is the intelligence applied to the network. And intelligence does not scale the way physical networks scaled. A bigger agency is not automatically a smarter one. In fact, the largest incumbents often carry the heaviest legacy, the most fragmented systems, the most accumulated complexity, which makes them slower to apply intelligence, not faster. Size, which was the great advantage of the old era, can become a liability in the new one.
I want to connect this to the threads I have been pulling on across everything I have written here, because this is where they converge.
Where the threads converge
I have argued that the largest hidden cost in travel is time, not fares. That the traveler does not want a better app, but to not think about the trip at all. That an AI agent is only as good as the data underneath it. That sustainability is stuck because companies cannot measure what they cannot connect. Every one of those arguments is, underneath, the same argument. They are all about intelligence and data winning over scale and access. The hidden cost of time is recovered by intelligence, not by a bigger network. The trip that manages itself is a product of intelligence, not reach. The trustworthy agent and the auditable emission are both products of connected data, not of size. I did not plan it this way, but every piece has been circling the same thesis: the constraint has moved from access to intelligence, and the industry’s structure has not caught up.
Here is what this means concretely for the next ten years, and why I think most of the industry is built for the wrong era.
What this means for the next ten years
The companies that win will not be the ones that assembled the biggest network. They will be the ones that can reason best over the networks that everyone now shares. They will compete on the quality of their judgment, encoded in software: how well they find the right fare in a volatile market, how well they apply a policy without friction, how well they anticipate a disruption before it happens, how well they turn the chaos of available options into a single right answer for a specific traveler. These are not scale advantages. They are intelligence advantages, and they accrue to whoever builds the best reasoning over the best-connected data, regardless of how many offices or aircraft or contracts they hold.
This is why a company founded recently, built natively around connected data and modern intelligence, can now compete with, and often outperform, incumbents many times its size. Not because it has a bigger network, it does not, but because the thing that matters is no longer the size of the network. It is what you can do with the access that everyone now has. The incumbents are not wrong that they have bigger networks. They are wrong that bigger networks are still the point.
And this, finally, is what that opening piece about Brazil was really about, though I did not fully see it at the time.
Back to Brazil
Brazil has the infrastructure, one of the largest airport networks anywhere, and still flies far below its potential. The network is not the binding constraint. The intelligence to use it well, the systems and the data and the reasoning that turn infrastructure into accessible, affordable, well-managed travel, that is the constraint. A country can have an enormous network and underperform it, exactly as a company can have an enormous network and be outcompeted by a smaller, smarter one. The lesson is the same at both scales: the network is necessary but no longer sufficient, and in an era where access is commoditizing, sufficiency lives in the intelligence layered on top.
I will resist the temptation to make this sound more certain than it is. The old logic is not dead; physical networks still matter, and they will keep mattering for a long time. You cannot fly a passenger on intelligence alone. The point is not that scale becomes worthless, but that it stops being the deciding factor, that it moves from being the moat to being the table stakes, the thing you need to have but not the thing that wins. The deciding factor moves up a layer, from the network to the intelligence applied to it.
If I am right, the next decade rewards a different kind of company than the last one did, and a different kind of thinking. It rewards the ones who understood early that access was commoditizing and intelligence was becoming scarce, and who built for the world that is arriving rather than defending the world that is leaving. It rewards the smartest network over the biggest one.
For a hundred years, the question that mattered in travel was “how big is your network?” I think the question that will matter for the next ten years is quieter and harder: “how well can you reason over a network that everyone can now reach?” The companies that have a good answer to that question, regardless of their size, are the ones I would bet on. And the companies still racing to assemble the biggest network, as though access were still the prize, are preparing, with great effort and expense, to win the last war.
The network got us here. The intelligence is what takes us forward. The next decade belongs to whoever understands the difference.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.