When AI Becomes the Travel Agent, Who Owns the Journey?

Watch more: Monday Conversation With Booking Holdings’ Daniel Marovitz

Travel has always had a front door and an operating layer. The front door was the search box, the app or the website. The operating layer was everything the consumer rarely saw: payments, currencies, supplier relationships, fraud controls, compliance, refunds and service.

AI is collapsing the distance between the two.

The AI that helps a traveler plan a wedding trip to Rome can take in the dates, likely weather, flights, hotel preferences and things to do. It can narrow the options, surface a payment choice and prepare the purchase. Eventually, it may make the purchase. At the same time, other AI agents are moving inside the travel platform, contacting hotel partners, filling supplier-information gaps and routing payments.

The consumer-facing assistant and the agents embedded in the platform are headed toward the same transaction. That’s when the fight over travel’s front door becomes a much bigger battle over who controls the journey.

“In the course of any technology adoption curve, not mobile phones, not personal computers, not the original adoption of the internet, original adoption of eCommerce, we’ve never seen consumer adoption like this,” Daniel Marovitz, SVP of Fintech at Booking.com and Booking Holdings, told Karen Webster. “It is absolutely breathtaking.”

Breathtaking adoption gets attention. But adoption isn’t the moat. Execution is.

The Front Door Moves. The Economics Don’t Disappear.

Webster framed AI as a new “front door” to commerce. In travel, that front door does more than replace a keyword box with a conversation. It lets the traveler bring the entire context into the interaction. The reason for the trip, the dates, the weather, the flights, the hotel and what happens after arrival.

Marovitz says that matters to Booking because direct traffic has been a “hard fought battle.” The company has spent years increasing the share of customers who arrive through its website or app, and Marovitz said keeping that direct relationship remains a critical priority.

Yet the LLM isn’t the first platform to sit between a traveler and the transaction. Google, Facebook and TikTok already do. The traffic source changes. The customer-acquisition challenge doesn’t suddenly start over.

“Is some of the traffic that would’ve come from Google or gone through Facebook or gone through TikTok gonna go through an LLM front door? I think for sure,” Marovitz said.

That answer sounds like a channel shift, but he agreed that it’s more than that. Search sends the traveler to a list. Conversational AI can hold the context, reduce the list and move the traveler toward a decision. The front door starts to absorb the funnel.

The Platform Moves Out of View. Its Value Doesn’t.

An LLM can propose a trip in seconds. Completing one is another matter.

Booking SVP of Fintech Marovitz pointed to OpenAI’s earlier experiment with direct commercial integrations, including Booking, which was later discontinued. The lesson was the distance between answering an eCommerce question and operating the machinery behind the answer.

A travel transaction can cross currencies and borders, involve local payment methods, onboard suppliers, screen for fraud and sanctions, process refunds and create customer-service obligations that last for months. Marovitz called travel payments “absolutely demonically complicated.”

AI doesn’t make that complexity go away, but it does make the complexity disappear from view.

The traveler may experience one clean conversation. Underneath it, the platform still has to supply the inventory, payments, supplier relationships, compliance and service that turn a recommendation into a completed trip. The interface may move. The execution layer becomes embedded.

That’s a different kind of platform power to both attract the consumer and make the transaction work when another interface attracts the consumer first.

Webster asked whether that was Booking’s moat and why its front door remains valuable in an agentic world. Marovitz didn’t hedge: “100%.”

AI Doesn’t Compresses the Decision

Marovitz said that traditional travel platforms were built to deliver abundance. Ask for a four-star hotel in Greenwich Village and the platform can return dozens of properties that meet the brief. Useful, yes. Decisive, no. The traveler still has to sort, compare and choose.

AI changes the value proposition. The win isn’t a longer list with better ranking. It’s a shorter path from intent to selection.

“The magic is mostly derived from respecting time,” he said. “At some point, when we get to a place where rather than searching through that, you’re selecting, because we give you three that we’re very, very sure you’re going to like.”

Getting from dozens to three takes more than keywords. Marovitz used sarcasm in hotel reviews as an example. Older machine-learning systems could classify a complaint as praise because the words looked positive. Modern language models can recognize what the reviewer actually meant.

The same reasoning can follow the traveler into payments. A larger purchase might trigger demand for buy now, pay later. A traveler with both euro- and dollar-denominated cards might be shown the more economical option. Discovery, selection and payment stop behaving like separate steps. They become one decision flow.

The Consumer Agent Meets the Enterprise Agent

The AI story gets much more interesting when it moves from the traveler’s screen into the platform itself.

Booking is testing voice AI agents that contact hotel partners about unpaid commissions, find the right person to speak with and navigate changes in staffing or contact information. Similar technology is being tested in supplier onboarding, where incomplete information would otherwise require manual follow-up.

Marovitz said AI can let customer service teams spend their time on the situations that actually require human judgment, including safety issues and unusual disruptions. Not a head-count discussion, he was quick to point out, but a way to allocate humans to the roles where they can be of most value to their customer. Their consumer and the suppliers they enable as part of the platform.

Marovitz said that AI is also embedded in payment routing. Booking can look at issuer location, transaction currency, purchase size and acquiring bank to choose the route most likely to produce an authorization. At Booking’s scale, a small lift in approvals matters. The system can also see what an operator may not, including an acquirer whose authorization performance deteriorates at particular times.

Put the pieces together and the convergence becomes clear. Consumer AI understands the trip. Embedded AI helps the platform assemble, pay for and support it. What the traveler experiences as a single conversation is powered by agents working on both sides of the transaction.

When the Agent Pulls Out a Wallet

Agent-initiated transactions come with a double edge. A completed sale and a potential source of liability.

Marovitz expects truly autonomous purchasing agents to emerge gradually. The complication begins when the agent acts on a broad instruction instead of a fixed order. It might decide that a $1,000 concert ticket is a sufficiently good deal and buy it. Existing payment systems generally assume that a person authorized the purchase. Agentic commerce breaks that assumption.

“I didn’t do it, it was my agent, “  he said describing the potential customer-service dilemma.

That’s why autonomy will likely arrive with a hand on the brake. Webster expects consumers to let an agent find the transaction, then ask for final approval before it commits the funds.

“Consumers want to delegate autonomy and authority, but only to a point, “ she said.

Marovitz agreed: “Human in a loop will be big.”

That human handoff isn’t a side issue. It’s where the consumer assistant becomes an economic actor, and where intent has to become authority. The platform that manages that boundary also manages the authorization, the dispute and the accountability that follow.

The New Moat Is What Happens After the Prompt

AI in travel is often reduced to a simple question: Does the consumer start with Booking, ChatGPT, Gemini or another interface? The Marovitz conversation makes the answer less simple and more consequential.

The prompt, the recommendation, the selection, the payment and the operations behind them are converging. A general-purpose AI may frame the trip. A travel platform may narrow the choices and supply the inventory. AI may surface the payment option, route the authorization, follow up with the supplier and prepare customer service for whatever happens next.

To the consumer, that can feel like one continuous interaction. Underneath, the platform is still doing the hard work.

That’s the paradox. AI may make the travel platform less visible at exactly the moment it makes the platform more important. The prompt may win the first interaction. The winner will be decided by who can turn the consumer’s intent into an authorized payment, a supplier commitment and service that still works months later.

Which begs the question Marovitz and Webster started the conversation asking: When AI becomes the travel agent, who owns the journey? The model that starts the conversation, or the platform that can finish the trip?

Watch the full PYMNTS TV episode with Booking Holdings’ Daniel Marovitz to hear more about:

How consumer AI and purchasing agents converge. The assistant that understands the trip is moving closer to the agent that narrows the choices, prepares the transaction and may eventually act.

Why the platform becomes embedded. The interface can change, but payments, supplier relationships, compliance and customer service still determine whether the trip gets completed.

Why human authority becomes a payments issue. When an agent moves from recommending to spending, approval, liability, disputes and accountability move to the center of agentic commerce.