Booking Holdings has launched Vayo, an artificial intelligence (AI) travel startup, with plans to invest $100 million, subject to continued product advancement and market conditions.
Travelers can now apply to join the waitlist for its free, invite-only private beta.
The Seattle-based startup was co-founded by CEO Mike Fridgen—also a venture partner at Madrona and former CEO of Madrona Venture Labs—and CTO Allen Chen, former CTO of Fanatics Collectibles.
The platform collects travel confirmations from users’ inboxes, organizing reservations into trip itineraries on Vayo’s website. From there, the technology monitors bookings for price drops and availability, alerting travelers if there is an opportunity to rebook at a better rate or if a table at a certain restaurant opens up.
“It learns every time you have a new booking, it sees that, it learns, it builds on the trips, it takes actions to improve them,” Fridgen told PhocusWire.
Vayo works with Booking Holdings' brands but can also organize and monitor reservations made through competitors such as Expedia, Fridgen said.
“We know that’s the reality of a traveler—most people don’t book in any single source. To be a trusted orchestrator of your travel life, a travel agent that works for you, it has to have access to everything, and it has to add value across all your bookings,” Fridgen said.
“Our goal is to provide complete coverage of supply and enable drop-off [to suppliers] and, over time, booking through multiple channels.”
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel echoed this, telling PhocusWire that Vayo “takes a completely traveler-centric approach.”
“Vayo’s openness allows it to create value regardless of where a reservation was made, earn the traveler’s trust and help us better understand where friction still exists across the trip. The strategic opportunity is to build a deeper, more useful relationship with customers by organizing the experience around their needs, not solely around where they happened to transact.”
Vayo is also able to monitor delays and cancellations, and it understands how those may affect other travel plans.
“This is the whole contextual intelligence, and the downstream effect of that late flight means your check-in is later, your restaurant reservation needs to be changed—you can see the vision of that and why a deep vertical experience would have more context and more value,” Fridgen said.
To address itinerary gaps and plan future travel, it draws on the user's interests and travel history, such as an annual trip.
“You can imagine that for different people’s lives. Sometimes they have long-distance relationships or kids in college, they’ve got a second home—there's all kinds of scenarios where people have these recurring patterns,” Fridgen said.
Vayo is able to book restaurant reservations, which go through Booking Holdings-owned OpenTable while the platform is in private beta. Fridgen confirmed there are plans to expand beyond OpenTable in the future.
Vayo can also automatically capture price drops and secure refunds for some flights, Fridgen said. For now, if a price drops at a hotel, Vayo prompts users to take additional action.
Travelers can search for flights and hotels in Vayo as well, but they’re handed off to the supplier to complete a booking for now. However, Fridgen said Vayo will be rolling out transactional booking for flights and hotels in the coming weeks, which will extend automated price-drop capture to more scenarios, including hotels.
Differentiation
Vayo is targeting the high-frequency leisure travel niche.
“They're time constrained, oftentimes they're professionals, they travel a lot, it's an important part of their life, and this is where their trip lives and this is how we get to work improving their travel life,” Fridgen said.
Vayo’s vertical travel focus is what sets it apart from horizontal agents such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Muse, according to Fridgen.
“This is deep in travel, a mile deep in travel, and really understands you and all the dimensions of your trip,” Fridgen said, highlighting Vayo’s proactive capabilities and its place in the travel partner ecosystem.
"What we see happening right now is horizontal agents are getting blocked in some cases as they crawl through browser use methods, these different suppliers and sources ... [Vayo] being part of that ecosystem, playing within it, is really going to help with the customer experience and the long-term viability of how agents work in the ecosystem that we have.”
As opposed to providing “walls of text,” Vayo also takes a visual approach.
“That once-a-year or that dream vacation, those aren’t things that you’re going to plan in a wall of text. It’s visual, it’s emotional, it’s exciting. Those are things that you need a full vertical travel experience to bring to life,” Fridgen said.
The big picture
Fogel has spoken about Booking Holdings’ connected trip vision for several years, and Fridgen said that Vayo was built as an “orchestrator” for this ambition.
“By design, it connects your trip. It looks in your inbox and builds them for you,” he said.
Vayo joins Lola in Booking Holdings' portfolio of AI startups. The AI assistant for experiences founded by Steve Hafner and Paul English introduced a membership model late last month.
Fogel has previously discussed setting up East Coast and West Coast startups as part of Booking Holdings' AI strategy, with Lola on the East Coast and now Vayo on the West.
When asked why Booking opted to set up separate businesses outside of its established brands, Fogel said this gives the teams greater agility in product development.
“Founding distinct startups gives the Vayo and Lola teams the freedom to design AI-native propositions from the ground up, move quickly and test new assumptions without being constrained by an existing product or brand model,” Fogel said.
“We can test multiple consumer hypotheses faster. At the same time, they benefit from being incubated within Booking Holdings, with access to our capital, experience, capabilities and relationships.”
Similar to Lola, Vayo isn’t using sponsored ads. But while Lola is a subscription model—with a free base tier—Vayo is still exploring monetization options.
“We're going to learn what people really value and understand that trade-off over time [and if there] is an opportunity for a subscription model or other business models,” Fridgen said. “But right now, we're so focused in this private beta on building a product they love.”
Fridgen said Vayo accesses only travel information in users’ inboxes, keeps other information private and allows users to revoke access at any time. He also said user data is not used to train the larger model.
Moving forward, Vayo is exploring a “multiplayer mode” for group travel, the ability to link loyalty accounts and a native app to manage trips while in-destination. General availability is likely in the first half of 2027.