Published:
Sep 13, 2025
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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The $1.6t travel industry may be about to check out of its longtime hotels: Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb. The rise of AI agents that could book your next trip directly may be the biggest threat to OTAs yet.
Booking and Expedia have already inked deals with OpenAI to spin up AI trip planners, while Airbnb rolled out an AI-powered customer service bot and promised “agentic” features next year. But behind the optimism lies inherent paranoia: if autonomous agents can comb hotel and airline sites directly, these platforms’ lucrative 15–20% commissions could vanish.
Hoteliers, long resentful of those fees, smell opportunity. “Fundamentally, [OTAs] are parasitic,” one investor argued, suggesting hotels could use the freed-up margins to sweeten customer perks. Meanwhile, fintech is circling: the same shift that threatens OTAs could accelerate the use of virtual cards in travel booking. For hotels and airlines, virtual cards promise better payment control, fraud reduction, and lower costs, and these advantages could compound if AI agents start transacting at scale without platform middlemen.
Today, OTAs still wield massive advantages: unrivaled datasets, traveler loyalty, and infrastructure that Big Tech might struggle to replicate. But as Glenn Fogel of Booking admitted, there’s “no such thing as a moat” in an AI-first world. If agents truly learn how to plan travel seamlessly, the biggest trip OTAs might be booking is their own exit.
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