Big prospects, few bookings: Travel execs weigh in on personal AI assistants

The latest round of travel industry earnings calls was the first since a wave of personal artificial intelligence (AI) assistants hit the market, and analysts had plenty of questions.

The emerging agents, including Instinct, Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, are designed to handle everything from daily tasks to planning and booking travel.

During Meta's third-quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called travel one of Muse's "top use cases." He also outlined plans to charge businesses fees for transactions facilitated through the platform.

Since its U.S. launch in September, Muse has expanded internationally, with recent expansion to Japan and Singapore.

Instinct founder Noah Shinn said in a September podcast interview that the invite-only platform was approaching $1 billion in annualized transaction volume, with "50% of that" coming from travel.

The consensus from travel companies? Discussions with AI platforms are widespread—but bookings remain scarce.

Early results

While companies didn’t share detailed metrics for the newer personal AI assistants, Uber offered a striking indication of booking volume through AI agents overall.

During the week of Halloween, one of its busiest weeks of the year, Uber and Uber Eats handled approximately 320 million trips and orders combined, according to CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy. Of those, just 500 Uber Eats orders came through AI agents.

"And for our rides business, it was a grand total of four trips that we fulfilled from agents."

At Booking Holdings, EVP and CFO Ewout Steenbergen said referrals from large language models (LLMs) and newer personal assistants remain significantly below 1% of Booking.com's room nights, although "we have seen some acceleration in the recent weeks." He said no individual platform was standing out in terms of growth.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company is seeing little traffic and “even fewer bookings” from Muse and Instinct, with traffic remaining relatively stable over the preceding four weeks. Chesky announced plans to launch Airbnb’s own AI travel agent in the first half of 2027.

Tripadvisor's outgoing CEO Matt Goldberg said AI-generated traffic is growing, despite accounting for less than 1% of total traffic.

Goldberg also pointed to strong discoverability for Tripadvisor and Viator in experiences-related prompts, suggesting AI-driven traffic may be better qualified.

"The conversion for each is multiples higher than average," Goldberg said, with AI-generated traffic converting at nearly five times the average rate for Viator and twice the average for Tripadvisor.

Despite the limited volumes, companies are positioning themselves to participate as the market develops.

"I am very excited by what I see vis-a-vis Muse, Instinct and a whole bunch of other activities we're in the middle of," said Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta. "You should assume we're working with each and every one of them."

Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt, voiced a similar approach. "Across Gemini, OpenAI, Instinct, Muse, you name it, we will have presence. We are going to remain relatively agnostic."

He noted, however, that the platforms differ in their capabilities and how they present Hyatt's products. The company's early experience with ChatGPT apps also showed travelers arriving through those channels tend to be younger and spend more on travel.

Expedia Group also reported high-intent traffic coming from AI platforms.

CEO Ariane Gorin said the company is using direct integrations, including a partnership with Muse, to better understand how consumers and agents interact with its offerings.

"We're using the integrations to learn about how our customer behavior is changing, understand how are the agents making decisions, what tech integrations are required and what kind of customers are using these," Gorin said.

The distribution question

Hilton’s Nassetta sees personal AI assistants as a potential boon for direct hotel distribution.

"These tools are ultimately going to lead to a path of our being able to drive much more direct business at lower cost structures, which will benefit us, but benefit our owner community, which is the most important element of it."

He does not, however, expect Hilton's relationships with online travel agencies (OTAs) to disappear.

Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, pushed back on the suggestion that personal agents would necessarily favor booking directly with suppliers.

"I have heard some of that, but I see other things too where the OTAs are actually getting a greater advantage right now," he said.

Recent research from Propellic suggests intermediaries could retain a significant role in agentic travel bookings. In scripted tests involving Muse and Instinct, bookings were more likely to be routed through intermediaries, primarily Duffel, than directly to suppliers.

Booking’s Steenbergen agreed, saying horizontal agents “like to partner with aggregators."

"It is going to be very expensive for them to connect to 4.7 million properties directly and get all the information about real-time data, pricing, availability," he said, adding that AI platforms could potentially develop a monetization model with the company.

Meanwhile, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi emphasized the importance of maintaining direct customer relationships as personal assistants become the latest intermediaries.

"I used to work in the travel business where we're dependent on the Googles of the world. I don't want to go back there," said Khosrowshahi, who previously led Expedia Group.

Can general-purpose agents deliver?

Several travel executives questioned whether general-purpose agents could offer the same experience as travel-specific platforms.

Rajesh Magow, co-founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip, argued that specialized travel platforms have advantages in proprietary data and the ability to manage bookings and provide support.

"General-purpose assistants are useful for inspiration and research, and some travelers may begin their journeys there. But planning a trip and committing money to it are different decisions."

Meanwhile, a recent experiment by AI adviser Allie K. Miller, recounted in a LinkedIn post, offered a firsthand look at the capabilities and limitations of personal AI assistants.

Miller gave OpenAI's Dot a $500 budget and 24 hours to plan an afternoon with a friend. The agent organized an enjoyable outing but repeatedly contacted the same restaurant, invited unavailable friends, misremembered dietary preferences and failed to deliver reminders.

"Overall, I sent more apologies for the AI than it would have taken to plan the afternoon myself," she wrote on LinkedIn.

Nevertheless, she said she would try again.

"Probably with a flight."

When asked on Delta Air Lines' third-quarter earnings call to comment on the emergence of AI-powered shopping assistants, CEO Ed Bastian said, "I'm not a big fan of the idea, and we'll be very cautious as we think about it for the future."

On Wednesday, United Airlines announced it is taking action to block "unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants" from accessing its platforms.