Artificial intelligence-powered answer engine Perplexity has launched a feature in collaboration with Selfbook and Tripadvisor that enables users to book hotels natively on Perplexity.
Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, shared the news on LinkedIn. Srinivas included a video showcasing the new mode selection and a short, in-platform hotel booking process powered by Selfbook— a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2023 that provides hotel booking and payment technology.
“We are introducing answer modes in Perplexity to make the core search product even better for verticals: travel, shopping, places, images, videos, jobs,” Srinivas said. “The next step is to get super precise [so] that you don't have to press on these tabs.”
After selecting a “mode,” users can make a natural language query with Perplexity that surfaces relevant answers based on Selfbook data and reviews from Tripadvisor. Users can then opt to book to complete the process.
The feature is available currently on the web and will be available on mobile soon, according to Srinivas.
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He added that there will be additional benefits for Perplexity’s “Pro” users—such as discounted hotel bookings—with details to come in the near future.
In an interview with PhocusWire ahead of the launch, Khalid Meniri, co-founder and CEO of Selfbook, said Selfbook’s role in the partnership is to provide infrastructure.
"At [our] core, we are [a] fintech company, but we are really providing the single API [application programming interface] to be the booking infrastructure," he said.
While the last decades have been characterized by a search engine like Google sharing different results and requiring navigation to get to the booking stage, Meniri believes 2025 is the “year of action … agentic action.”
“You should be able to purchase or book anything from [the] point of inspiration,” he said.
According to Meniri, while there may be more capabilities in the future, it was an obvious choice to start with hotels given Selfbook's history.
"Plus [they're] really the most ... complicated thing to book, because you buy in space over time for [a] certain number of people, and any of those variables can change."
Meniri also touched on other elements of travel that could be incorporated down the road.
“I feel like hotels are a crucial part, but flights and car rentals are probably a fast follow,” he said. “But for now, the focus is going to be hotels.”
Tripadvisor announced in January that it would be partnering with Perplexity to better trip planning.
The partnership included the incorporation of Tripadvisor’s AI-generated summaries, reviews and over 300,000 experiences from Viator in combination with Perplexity’s chatbot search.
"The companies aim to provide personalized and actionable recommendations to simplify and enrich the trip-planning process,” a Tripadvisor statement read at the time.
The answer modes should take the answer engine to the next level, according to Srinivas.
“Going beyond answering a wall of text and being good at structured answers for verticals with entities like images, videos [and] cards with built-in commercial transactions is a necessary step for being a daily-usage product and taking on Google,” he said.
Agentic AI has been a hot topic at the top of 2025. In January, OpenAI launched its “Operator,” which can also book travel. Amazon also recently launched its own AI agent, Alexa+ that can book elements of travel such as rideshare.