The humble travel text message is getting an upgrade. RCS messaging for travel brands is changing the way companies connect with their customers, offering richer and more interactive experiences.
UK travel and hospitality companies are rapidly moving toward Rich Communication Services, better known as RCS, as brands rethink how they talk to customers before, during and after a trip.
New figures highlighted by Breaking Travel News, based on Infobip’s Messaging Trends Report 2026, show RCS interactions in the UK travel and hospitality sector jumped by more than 300% during 2025. SMS grew too, but at a much slower 22%. WhatsApp interactions increased by 4%.
That’s quite a gap.
And there’s another piece to this story: AI is starting to sit behind those conversations.
RCS Is Starting to Look Less Like a Text Message
RCS has been talked about for years, often as the eventual successor to traditional SMS. Adoption was patchy. Device support was messy. Most consumers didn’t particularly care what protocol delivered their boarding alert.
That picture is changing.
Infobip says RCS reached roughly 70% penetration in the UK, while travel and hospitality businesses recorded more than six million RCS interactions during 2025.
Unlike a conventional SMS, RCS can support richer, app-like interactions inside the phone’s messaging interface. A hotel could send an interactive reservation confirmation. An airline could provide flight updates alongside buttons or other actions. A travel company could potentially keep support, reminders and booking-related conversations inside one message thread.
No new app required.
That simplicity matters in travel, where customers are already bouncing between airline apps, booking websites, email inboxes, airport screens and half a dozen confirmation messages.
Apple Helped Push RCS Into the Mainstream
One reason RCS suddenly feels much harder to ignore is Apple’s decision to support the standard.
Infobip’s broader 2026 messaging research describes 2025 as a breakthrough year for RCS and points to a sharp rise in traffic following Apple’s introduction of RCS support on its devices in 2024.
That removed one of the technology’s biggest historical problems.
For years, RCS was heavily associated with Android. Businesses couldn’t assume a customer would receive the same experience across major smartphones. Wider platform support makes it easier for companies to treat RCS as an actual customer channel rather than an interesting experiment.
Infobip’s Messaging Trends Report is based on 628 billion mobile interactions processed during 2025, alongside analysis of 3.8 trillion messages exchanged across its platform over two decades.
The broader conclusion from that dataset is fairly clear: business messaging is becoming more conversational, not less.
Then Agentic AI Enters the Conversation
This is where the story becomes more relevant to AI.
Messaging channels such as RCS and WhatsApp are increasingly becoming the front end for automated customer journeys. The chatbot isn’t necessarily sitting on a website anymore. It can live directly inside the conversation a traveller is already using.
Infobip’s separate 2026 Customer Experience Maturity research found that 53% of surveyed brands have adopted agentic AI for use-case automation. At the same time, 96% automate customer communications in some form.
There is a big difference between those two things.
Basic automation sends a flight reminder.
An AI-powered system could theoretically understand a response, check booking information, suggest an alternative, authenticate the traveller and continue the conversation without forcing that person through several disconnected systems.
That is the same broader shift already appearing in travel platforms such as Fliggy’s agentic AI travel assistant, where AI is moving from recommendations toward actually completing booking and servicing tasks.
That’s the direction companies are chasing.
Travel Could Be an Obvious Testing Ground for AI Agents
Travel is full of repetitive but time-sensitive customer interactions.
Booking confirmations. Check-in reminders. Gate changes. Hotel arrival instructions. Loyalty questions. Reservation amendments. Delays. Cancellations.
Most don’t require an hour-long conversation with a human agent. They do require accurate information and, increasingly, the ability to take action.
RCS gives businesses a richer interface for those interactions. Agentic AI potentially gives the conversation some intelligence behind the scenes.
Put the two together and a message saying your flight has changed could eventually become a conversation that also handles what happens next.
That is more useful than simply making SMS prettier.
Airlines are already moving in a similar direction by using AI across pricing, loyalty and customer-service workflows, making messaging another part of a much wider automated travel journey.
There Is Still a Messy Part
AI-powered customer service isn’t suddenly solved because businesses have better messaging channels.
Infobip’s CX research found only 58% of surveyed brands said their channels were fully synchronised. Just 60% reported having centralised customer data, while 50% described their systems as fully API-ready for automation.
Agentic AI depends heavily on exactly that infrastructure.
An AI travel assistant is far less impressive if it can’t see the reservation system, loyalty account or latest schedule data. Worse, disconnected systems can turn automation into another layer customers have to fight through before reaching a human.
The messaging interface may be getting smarter faster than the systems behind it.
That same infrastructure problem is showing up in corporate travel, where Direct Travel is building AI on top of a more unified data and workflow layer rather than treating the agent as a standalone chatbot.
RCS Growth Points to a Bigger Shift
The 300% jump in RCS shouldn’t be read as the death of SMS. SMS is still growing among UK travel and hospitality brands, and WhatsApp remains another major piece of the conversational messaging market.
What looks more interesting is the combination.
Companies are moving from broadcasting messages toward maintaining conversations across several channels. AI agents can increasingly participate in those conversations, remember context and potentially complete tasks rather than simply answer FAQs.
For travellers, the technology itself may stay mostly invisible.
They probably won’t care whether the interaction is technically RCS, WhatsApp or something else. They’ll care that a missed connection can be fixed without opening four apps and sitting on hold.
That may be where the real competition starts.
