Elevator Talk: Would You Trust an AI Agent to Book Your Next Trip?

September 28, 2026

Would you let an AI assistant pick your flight, choose your hotel and pay for both without you opening a single website? Expedia plans to let U.S. travelers book hotels inside Meta's Muse AI assistant, with search and payment handled right in the chat. Launch timing hasn't been confirmed. When Blake shared the news in an internal Slack thread, the team had strong opinions about who will actually use agentic booking and what it means for the brands being booked.

The Web Might Not Be Ready. Or the Bots Aren't.

Blake Nielson
Blake NielsonHead of Accounts

I'm super interested in agents like Muse handling day-to-day tasks, especially booking travel or buying things for users. I'm not sure it's being widely adopted yet, and I think there are two possible reasons:

  1. Websites aren't actually ready to handle bots booking travel or buying things on their sites.
  2. The bots aren't smart enough to actually do this yet.

Would anybody trust Muse to book their flights and hotels? I'm not sure I would.

Flights and Hotels Are for the Laptop

Katie Jancsura
Katie Jancsura Senior Account Director

I'm too much of a control freak to let a bot book my travel.

Brandon Stauffer
Brandon StaufferSenior Account Director

As a millennial, some of these things are desktop purchases.

Blake Nielson
Blake NielsonHead of Accounts

My thoughts exactly. Flights and hotels are for the laptop.

Yes, If There's a Confirmation at Every Step

Paxton Gray
Paxton GrayCEO

I would let a bot book for me, especially if there was some back-and-forth on the itinerary and a confirmation at each step.

The Transaction Never Touches the Website

Brad Porter
Brad PorterSearch Marketer

The interesting part is that it's all handled within Muse. Hotel selection and payment happen in a conversational interface, while Expedia remains the merchant of record for the booking.

I'll be curious to see how many other sites agree to let a third-party AI tool handle the whole transaction instead of the website itself.

Everyone in the Chain Has to Get Paid

Mike Witham
Mike WithamHead of Search

I don't think this ever becomes the norm. Travel isn't a regular enough purchase for most people to squeeze five steps of the customer journey into one.

To Brad's point, that means Muse, Expedia and the hotel or airline all have to get paid. If this catches on, prices will eventually go up for everyone, whether you use it or not. I could see it doing to travel what DoorDash has done to the cost of food.

It's a Partnership, Not an Open Door

Blake Nielson
Blake NielsonHead of Accounts

I dug into how Expedia got this, and it's entirely a partnership with Meta. So this level of service and infrastructure only exists for certain sites. And yes, Meta is absolutely taking a cut of these purchases, which will raise costs across the board.

Whether or not you have an exclusive partnership with Meta, e-commerce brands need agent-friendly websites. Some users will book this way regularly. Maybe not for a big family vacation, but for business travelers flying a few times a month, this could be a huge thing.

Business Travel Is the Real Use Case

Paxton Gray
Paxton GrayCEO

Agreed. I'd happily hand off the logistics of business travel to a bot that knows my preferences (aisle seat, thank you very much). A once-a-year vacation is different.

But if I knew the bot only had access to certain hotels or airlines because of a partnership, and not every available option, I wouldn't use it.

The Takeaway

The team didn't agree on whether agentic booking goes mainstream, but three points came up again and again.

  1. Trust depends on the kind of trip. For big, rare, emotional purchases like a family vacation or a bucket-list trip, people want to be in control, often on a laptop. Routine, repeat purchases are different. Business travel follows known preferences, so it's the most likely place for agents to catch on first, especially when the agent checks in before each step.
  2. Being left out is a real risk. Muse's Expedia integration is a partnership, not an open marketplace. Users like Pax say they'll walk away if an agent only shows partner options. For brands, the bigger worry is that agents may not show them at all. When the booking happens entirely inside a third-party AI tool, your website may never see the visit, only the transaction. That's why AI search visibility now means showing up for agents as well as for people.
  3. Someone pays the middlemen. Every layer between the traveler and the hotel or airline takes a cut. Over time that cost could reach consumers the same way delivery apps changed what we pay for food.

What brands should do now, partnership or not:

  • Make sure agents can read and act on your site: clean structured data, clear pricing and availability, and checkout flows that don't break for automated users.
  • Keep your core offer consistent across the places agents pull from, including third-party listings, OTAs and review platforms.
  • Watch which transactions start moving off your site, and track agent traffic as its own channel.

Agentic commerce may not change how everyone books travel or shops online,, but it will change how some customers book. If you're not sure your site is ready for them, let's talk.

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