The humble travel text message is starting to look a little old. This is where Agentic AI and RCS come in, promising a fresh approach to how we communicate and interact while on the move.
UK travel and hospitality companies are rapidly increasing their use of Rich Communication Services, or RCS, as brands look for something more interactive than traditional SMS. And sitting behind that shift is another technology moving quickly into customer communications: agentic AI.
New figures from communications platform Infobip suggest RCS traffic among UK travel and hospitality businesses jumped by more than 300% during 2025. SMS didn’t disappear — far from it. It still grew 22% in the sector. WhatsApp interactions also increased, although at a much more modest 4%.
The interesting part isn’t simply that another messaging format is growing. It’s what brands are starting to put inside those conversations.
RCS Is Becoming More Than an SMS Replacement
RCS has been hovering around the mobile industry for years, often described as the eventual successor to SMS. That description doesn’t really capture what businesses are now trying to do with it.
Unlike a standard text message, RCS can support richer branded conversations, interactive elements and verified business identities. That makes the channel useful for things such as booking confirmations, itinerary changes, check-in information, loyalty offers and customer support.
For airlines, hotels and travel operators, those aren’t occasional interactions. They’re scattered throughout the whole customer journey.
Infobip says RCS penetration in the UK has now reached 70%, while more than six million RCS interactions were recorded across the country’s travel and hospitality sector during 2025.
Security is part of the appeal too. Verified senders can make it easier for customers to distinguish legitimate company messages from increasingly convincing phishing and “smishing” attempts.
Then Agentic AI Enters the Conversation
This is where the story becomes much more than a messaging-platform update.
Travel brands are beginning to combine conversational channels such as RCS and WhatsApp with AI agents capable of doing more than answering a basic FAQ.
Infobip’s CX research indicates that more than half of global brands have already introduced agentic AI for tasks including account authentication and travel reminder notifications.
The next jump is obvious, although technically much harder: keeping an entire customer interaction inside one conversation.
A traveller could ask about a reservation, change part of a booking, receive updated departure information and check loyalty benefits without bouncing between a website, an app, an email inbox and a call centre.
That’s the promise, anyway.
Travel Is a Particularly Interesting Test for AI Agents
Customer-service AI sounds easy when the example is “What time does the store close?”
Travel is messier.
Flights move. Hotel availability changes. Passengers miss connections. Weather interrupts schedules. Booking rules vary. Prices can shift. Some situations require authentication before a company can reveal or change anything.
An AI agent operating in that environment has to understand the conversation, connect with live business systems and know when it shouldn’t make a decision on its own.
That makes travel a useful test case for agentic AI. Infobip has separately argued that AI-driven engagement through channels including WhatsApp and RCS can help travel companies communicate proactively during disruptions.
If these systems can reliably handle complicated, time-sensitive customer journeys, they’re much closer to becoming genuinely useful infrastructure rather than just another chatbot layer.
SMS Isn’t Going Away
It would be easy to frame the rise of RCS as the death of SMS. The numbers don’t really support that.
SMS traffic is still growing among UK travel and hospitality companies. Globally, Infobip says SMS represented 62% of traffic measured in its 2026 messaging research.
What appears to be fading is the idea that one channel should handle everything.
Brands are spreading communication across SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, email and other platforms depending on what a particular interaction requires.
An urgent notification might be one thing. A two-way booking conversation is another.
AI increasingly becomes the layer deciding how those conversations work.
The Bigger Shift Is From Notifications to Conversations
For years, automated customer communication mostly meant sending something.
Your flight is delayed.
Your booking is confirmed.
Your room is ready.
Now companies want the customer to answer — and they want the system on the other side to actually do something with that answer.
That distinction matters.
Infobip’s wider Messaging Trends Report 2026, based on 628 billion mobile interactions recorded during 2025 and 3.8 trillion messages examined across two decades, reported global RCS traffic growth of 311%.
The company’s data also points toward increasingly omnichannel communication, where businesses combine multiple messaging platforms rather than betting everything on one.
Agentic AI could make that considerably more powerful. It could also make badly designed customer service considerably more frustrating.
The technology still has to earn the trust implied by all that automation.
For travel brands, though, the direction is getting hard to miss. The automated message isn’t disappearing.
It’s learning how to reply.
Sources
- Breaking Travel News — “RCS emerges as fastest-growing channel for UK travel and hospitality brands”
- Infobip — Messaging Trends Report 2026
- Infobip — UK business communication research on the rise of RCS and AI-driven communication
