Travelers in the U.S. will be able to describe what they’re looking for, including dates, destination and hotel preferences, be presented with options that fit their needs and make a booking.
Expedia remains the merchant of record for the bookings and payment is completed through Muse. No specific date has been given for when Expedia in Muse will be available.
The company is already working with Meta to test in-feed conversational ads on the platform. The initiative, revealed at its Explore event in May, enables travelers to start planning a trip or ask questions.
Expedia is also part of Google’s agentic booking launch alongside other partners, including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Booking.com and Marriott International.
In a blog post earlier this week, Expedia Group’s Xavier Amatriain laid out the company’s operating model for AI. In the post, he provided Expedia's definition of agentic as “an AI-powered system that works toward a goal.”
“It can use context and memory, draw on skills, reason across multiple steps and use tools to gather information or make progress,” he said.
Amatriain added that some tasks would be carried out over time and “require the system to maintain relevant context, adapt to changing conditions and work through a sequence of decisions.”
In the post he also spoke of the future of travel AI as a “composed, multi-agent system.”
He said specialized agents could deliver value by carrying out specific jobs such as helping with discovery, comparing properties and “orchestrating those specialized agents can create a continuous, end-to-end whole-trip experience.”
Online travel stocks fell on Wednesday, September 23 amid investor fears that Muse will disrupt the aggregator landscape.
In a recent roundup of news impacting online travel agencies (OTAs), Jake Fuller, managing director of investment bank BTIG, said that AI assistants such as Muse and Instinct, are useful in travel in “a way that none of the tools we've tested before have been. Rather than re-packaging traditional search results, assistants like Instinct AI (Private) & Meta's Muse use the sites you would on your behalf to find-book-manage travel.”
He added, however, that the breadth of content, loyalty programs and hotel-funded discounts make OTAs as well-placed “in this emerging channel as any other.”
Fuller also said that Instinct and Muse could be a source of free traffic for OTAs as neither take a commission cut compared to LLMs, which are trialing ad models.
Flight booking, enabled by U.K.-based Duffel, was unveiled as part of the Muse launch alongside direct booking with airlines.
Tags: artificial intelligence Expedia Xavier Amatriain Expedia Group Hotel
