AI Agents Can Book Your Hotel. They Can't Find Half of Airbnb. | Edition 349

An AI that books your trip just spooked the entire travel industry.

In late September, Meta unveiled Muse, its personal AI agent, at Meta Connect. Ask it for a hotel in Paris and it can search, compare and book. Expedia announced it was joining Muse as a partner the day before. Investors did not wait to see how it played out. On September 23, Expedia fell 7.7%, Airbnb fell 7.6% and Booking Holdings fell 5.1%.

The fear is simple. Sites like Expedia and Booking make their money by being where you search. If an AI does the searching for you, why would it care which site the room comes from?

Why Airbnb might be the exception

The Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column made a sharp point this week: an AI agent can find you the cheapest hotel room in Paris, but it cannot find a cheaper version of that Catskills cabin you have been eyeing, because that cabin may only exist on Airbnb.

That is the difference. Most hotel rooms on Booking or Expedia can also be booked directly or on a competing site, so an agent has no reason to favor either one. Airbnb is different. More than half of its listings are only on Airbnb. More than 90% of its traffic comes straight to its app or website, not through Google or other middlemen. And according to Bernstein, 90% of guests go on to message their host about keys, arrival times or local fees, which keeps Airbnb in the middle of the trip after you book.

Airbnb’s CEO says AI is helping, not hurting

Brian Chesky has been unusually blunt. He told TechCrunch he tried Airbnb inside Muse and Instinct, another AI agent, and “it doesn’t work well.” His argument: people enjoy planning trips, often as a group, and scrolling dozens of homes is not something a text chatbot does well. A chatbot might be fine for reordering paper towels, he joked at a Skift conference, but not for picking where your family spends a week.

Instinct, a startup whose AI agent you simply text, shows both sides. Its founder says more than half of what it books is travel. When a Business Insider reporter tested it, Instinct built a full budget for a three-night New York business trip in about 10 minutes, roughly half the time it took him by hand. For a fun weekend away, it took close to an hour, picked a hotel he did not like and missed a cheaper train fare. His verdict: great for routine trips, worse than doing it yourself for a vacation, which is exactly Chesky’s point.

So far, Chesky says, chatbots are sending customers to Airbnb, not taking them away. Airbnb is still building its own AI agent, which it plans to launch in 2027.

The catch

The Journal points out the irony. Some of Airbnb’s newest growth plans, like adding hotels, car rentals and advertising, make it look more like Booking and Expedia, the businesses AI agents threaten most. And Airbnb has no real loyalty program. Hilton and Marriott give business travelers a reason to stay put. Airbnb gives you nothing for coming back.

What it means for your next trip

Use an AI agent to compare hotel prices. That is exactly what they are good at, since the same room is often sold in several places.

Watch for paid placements. Booking sites already sell sponsored spots to push certain hotels; Wells Fargo expects those to be about 8% of Expedia’s revenue next year. An AI pulling from those sites can inherit the same bias. Ask it why it picked what it picked.

For unique stays, go to the source. If the place you want only exists on Airbnb or Vrbo, an agent may miss it or show fewer options. Browse there yourself.

Check the final price before you confirm. Agents can book fast. Taxes, cleaning fees and cancellation rules still apply, so read them before you say yes.

Every time how we shop changes, from desktop to phone and now to AI, the middlemen get nervous. The ones that survive own something you cannot easily get anywhere else. For Airbnb, that is the homes. For everyone else, the race is on.