Xiao Lin once had a respectable and stable job in the revenue management department of a well-known chain hotel.
His daily tasks involved monitoring changes in room availability across major booking channels, while manually scraping competitive pricing data from across the internet. Life was good — until the first half of this year, when the group aggressively introduced an AI revenue system. From that moment, Xiao Lin's work environment changed completely.
Previously, their department needed two employees working in coordination to handle the complex routine price update operations. By early summer, that position was hard-cut to just one person.
Xiao Lin became the one forced to leave. He recounted the conversation when his supervisor tried to let him go:
"Can you run faster than the system?"
The words sounded cold and heartless, but Xiao Lin found no room to argue — because the algorithm really was faster than human brains, and it wouldn't tire from exhaustion.
In fact, similar layoffs happened earlier in overseas tourism. In 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global career consulting firm, U.S. companies explicitly attributed approximately 55,000 job cuts directly to AI.
While these positions weren't all from tourism, industry media Skift found similar changes appearing across airlines, hotel groups, and travel tech companies. In February, travel tech company Sabre launched layoffs, adjusting management while announcing a 600 million dollar investment in AI.