HFS Horizons: Travel and Hospitality Service Provider Ecosystem, 2025

The HFS Horizons: Travel and Hospitality Service Provider Ecosystem, 2025 report is for CIOs, chief digital officers, and travel and hospitality transformation leaders evaluating service providers to scale AI, ecosystem orchestration, and sustainability across airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and restaurants.

Overview

The HFS Horizons: Travel and Hospitality Service Provider Ecosystem, 2025 report evaluates 22 service providers reshaping how airlines, hotels, cruise lines, online travel agencies, and restaurants compete in an experience-first, AI-powered economy. The study concludes that ecosystem orchestration, not isolated point solutions, has become the dominant provider model.

Key findings

• Eleven providers are positioned as Horizon 3 Market Leaders: Accenture, Coforge, Cognizant, HCLTech, IGT Solutions, Infosys, Kyndryl, Publicis Sapient, Sutherland, TCS, and WNS, alongside six Horizon 2 Enterprise Innovators and five Horizon 1 Disruptors.
• TCS, Coforge, and Cognizant emerged as the top-choice strategic partners for travel and hospitality clients, cited by 27%, 23%, and 20% of customer references, while Accenture, TCS, and Deloitte lead among technology partner references at 46%, 33%, and 17%.
• Customers rated providers lowest on intellectual property and R&D at 7.9 out of 10 and on identifiable investments at 8.1, signaling a clear innovation gap.
• New business model creation and market entry scored at the bottom of delivered outcomes at 7.8 from customers and 8.3 from partners, indicating providers still prioritize optimization over growth-led transformation.
• Named outcomes include WNS driving US$2 billion in incremental revenue for a North American hotel chain through 40 ML-based personalization models, Cognizant saving over US$5 million by migrating 320TB of hospitality data to BigQuery, and Accenture’s GenAI factory with Air France-KLM cutting development cycles by more than one-third.
• HFS finds that travel and hospitality is shifting from digital hygiene to bold transformation, where data-driven personalization, sustainability imperatives, and ecosystem collaboration are the new competitive differentiators. HFS assesses that GenAI and agentic AI have moved from pilots to enterprise-scale deployments across refund automation, crew scheduling, predictive maintenance, and personalized journeys.

The Bottom Line

Enterprises that embrace generative AI, orchestrated customer journeys, and ecosystem-driven innovation will shape the next era of travel, moving beyond selling seats and rooms to curating seamless, climate-conscious, and hyper-personalized experiences that build lasting brand equity.

Research methodology

This Horizons evaluation draws on vendor briefings, 40 client reference checks, 32 partner reference checks, and HFS Pulse data covering 305 enterprise leaders, conducted globally by HFS Research in 2025.

To read the rest of the research, click the download button below.