Expedia is enabling travelers to book hotels through Muse,
the personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistant unveiled by Meta earlier
this month.
Travelers in the U.S. will be able to describe what they’re
looking for, including dates, destination and hotel preferences, be presented
with options that fit their needs and make a booking.
Expedia remains the merchant of record for the bookings and
payment is completed through Muse. No specific date has been given for when
Expedia in Muse will be available.
The company is already working with Meta to test in-feed conversational ads on the platform. The initiative, revealed at its Explore event in May, enables travelers to
start planning a trip or ask questions.
Expedia is also part of Google’s agentic booking
launch alongside other partners, including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Booking.com
and Marriott International.
In a blog post earlier this week, Expedia Group’s Xavier
Amatriain laid out the company’s operating model for AI. In the post, he provided Expedia's definition of agentic as “an AI-powered system that
works toward a goal.”
“It can use
context and memory, draw on skills, reason across multiple steps and use tools
to gather information or make progress,” he said.
Amatriain
added that some tasks would be carried out over time and “require the system to
maintain relevant context, adapt to changing conditions and work through a
sequence of decisions.”
In the post
he also spoke of the future of travel AI as a “composed, multi-agent system.”
He said
specialized agents could deliver value by carrying out specific jobs such as
helping with discovery, comparing properties and “orchestrating those specialized
agents can create a continuous, end-to-end whole-trip experience.”
Online travel stocks fell on Wednesday, September 23 amid investor fears that Muse will disrupt the aggregator landscape.
In a recent roundup of news impacting online travel agencies (OTAs),
Jake Fuller, managing director of investment bank BTIG, said that AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, are
useful in travel in “a way that none of the tools we've
tested before have been. Rather than re-packaging traditional search results,
assistants like Instinct AI (Private) & Meta's Muse use the sites you would
on your behalf to find-book-manage travel.”
He added, however, that the breadth of content,
loyalty programs and hotel-funded discounts make OTAs as well-placed “in this
emerging channel as any other.”
Fuller also said that Instinct and Muse could be
a source of free traffic for OTAs as neither take a commission cut compared to
LLMs, which are trialing ad models.
Flight booking, enabled by U.K.-based Duffel, was unveiled as part of the Muse launch alongside direct booking with airlines.