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In this case everything behind the "?" in the link is not relevant.
When I look at flying today nearly every fundamental part from what I learned in my 90s studies was already there, e. g. yield management, pricing strategies, cost management or code sharing, but nowadays it has just developed further, e. g. more digital. The Homo Oeconomicus became true.
The aviation industry is an antagonism because it is nearly the only industry where you got less over the decades, no-frills like Ryanair were coming up and killed every exclusivity on flying. Today a fight is just a bus ride, nothing special. Compare this with videos from 70s or 80s. I remember my first transatlantic flight in the 80s in Delta Business Class. A lounge was a very different (decent) experience than today. Hotel stays and other travel services followed this price-dumping no-frill: travel for the masses was established. Or like Depeche Mode were singing in the 80s "Everything counts in small amounts".
Today the IT and tech giants want us to believe that "AI" is the next big thing - well parts of it called "BI" (business intelligence) existed already in the late 90s. Airlines like Lufthansa used it for data mining to find out why their SLF is significant lower on direction of a connection than on the other one. Solutions like Business Objects were the big thing, delivering answers after the data were identified and assembled.
Also personalized e-commerce was already there in 2000. Solutions such as Brokat were the very early companies in this case. They enabled companies to treat their customers online individually based on a status or criteria.
A general trend which changed not only travel very much was the discovery of CRM: for example Patricia Seybold's book customers.com were eye-openers. Companies learned that customers and the relationship to them played a larger role than they ever knew. Tom Siebel with its software was the hype around 2000 - and until a few years later it was never combinable with SAP (rolled-out 10-20 yrs earlier in most large companies) because of very different basic software architecture approaches.
As a traveler ya sure the Internet and social bla bla changed. And sorry to rephrase Rick: when they started nearly all information was there but just somewhere else, today 80% of data is no information - and humankind never learned how to deal with it. So the search is still there but it changed from gathering to sorting out relevant information. And it will get worse with LLM (what many call AI but is not).
A big changer were flat fees - remember the day where you had to pay for every call? As child of West-Berlin I lived on a paradise island at that time because all local calls were free and no West-Berlin kid or teen had friends to call outside Berlin Wall either, so free telephony 24/7 for West-Berlin teens - impossible for kids in small towns of West-Germany with friends in the next village. By the way: in these times also the cinema programs were available on a speech loop you could call.
As West-Berlin child car and train travels changed most with the reunification 1990 - compared to this nearly every other change becomes small. You cannot imagine the inner release of the people of Berlin at both sides of the Wall. Therefore this momentum was irreversible and unstoppable.
Did travel lose fascination over the last 40 years? Somehow yes - I hope for me only - but I traveled so much in my business life that it lost the special feeling but at one or the other moment I catch me smiling on a ferry in a fjord or when - before TXL was closed - only the antenna of Berlin's TV tower was peaking out of the low hanging and sunrise-lighted from the top rain clouds over Berlin when the plane which started to East turned in a steep curve to West over the city area of Berlin. And I am still smiling while remembering this.
