The company announced last week that it plans to bring agentic booking in AI Mode to travel two weeks after announcing a similar move for restaurant, events and beauty treatments.
Speaking at The Phocuswright Conference in San Diego last week, James Byers, group product manager of Google, said that “bedrock” for the company is “helping our users and connecting them to the right partner, the right price, the right time.”
Byers said that regardless of how travelers book a hotel, Google does not want a lot of “commercial barriers to playing there.”
“At the moment, we see this being a similar model that we have today. We'll adapt it if we need to, but this is really meant for every partner, for every way to buy and have as open an ecosystem as we can have.”
Google has already announced that it is working to build out the experience with partners such as Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott International, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Choice Hotels International and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
The news came just weeks after the search giant announced a similar move for restaurant, event and beauty treatment bookings.
Google has not put a time frame on agentic booking capabilities, and Byers said he sees two potential hurdles to launching the initiative for travel: making the experience seamless and understanding what travelers want from it.
The experience element can be solved in the next few months, according to Byers, while learning what travelers want will happen over the course of 2026.
“That's one we're going to learn together with our partners and with the ecosystem as we go. We'll see what users want. I think 2026 will be the year where we learn a lot. Hard lessons, fun lessons, a whole mix—as we as we enter this brave new world.”
The discussion also touched on building trust with users, creating differentiation between large language models and evolution in advertising models in AI.
Watch the full interview with PhocusWire’s Morgan Hines:
Executive Interview: Travel search in the AI era according to Google
Tags: James Byers, Google AI Mode, Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott International, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Choice Hotels International Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, The Phocuswright Conference