Airlines and travel booking platforms are splitting over whether to allow third-party artificial intelligence (AI) agents to handle reservations or build their own assistants to retain control over customers and transactions.
United Airlines said Wednesday (Nov. 11) that it is blocking unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking its flights, PYMNTS reported. OpenAI moved the other way a day earlier, when its acquisition of AI travel agent startup Odessia became public. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, meanwhile, said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week that Airbnb is building its own AI travel agent.
United Blocks Outside AI Agents From Booking Flights
United is updating its booking, ticketing and distribution policies to keep unauthorized personal AI assistants off its website and app, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Nov. 11). The restriction also covers agents that reach United through travel agencies and aggregators. United warned that sharing logins with an AI assistant could expose customer data or lead to unintended purchases, reservation changes or redemption of MileagePlus miles.
AI agents can still search United flights and show prices, and United said bookings from AI agents remain minimal.
“To be honest, I don’t want to create another middleman,” United CEO Scott Kirby said at an industry event in Chicago, PYMNTS reported. The comment echoes airlines’ past fights with online travel agencies over ticketing, customer relationships and fees.
JPMorgan Chase made the same call in banking a month earlier. Outside AI agents cannot log in with a JPMorgan customer’s credentials, send money or pay bills, PYMNTS reported. “You don’t want rogue agents, and there could be thousands of them,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.
Delta Air Lines has not followed United. Delta lets AI assistants that can authenticate a passenger’s credentials complete bookings, PYMNTS reported.
Airbnb Builds Its Own Agent to Keep Bookings In-House
The Airbnb agent will begin rolling out to guests in the first half of 2027, the company said in its third-quarter earnings update. The agent arranges maps, photos, comparisons, calendars and itineraries into a page built around each guest’s request instead of answering in chat text.
More than 75% of guests use Airbnb maps when deciding where to stay, and 70% read reviews before booking. Airbnb said guests want to browse and compare homes themselves rather than hand the choice to an agent.
Chesky plans to extend the agent past homes and hotels. Airbnb expects “all bookings going through the app for every vertical in travel,” Chesky said on the earnings call. Chesky said handling those bookings inside the app gives Airbnb a greater share of revenue and makes it responsible for customer service.
OpenAI Buys Odessia While AI Bookings Stay Under 1%
While Airbnb builds an agent for its own app, OpenAI bought a travel agent that does the booking. Odessia let a traveler plan and book a trip in a single conversation. It built the itinerary, quoted prices and completed the reservation inside its own interface instead of sending the traveler to supplier websites, PYMNTS reported.
OpenAI has yet to announce a standalone travel product, though it counts Booking.com, Expedia and Kayak as customers or partners, TechCrunch reported.
AI agents send booking platforms little business so far. Traffic from large language models remained below 1% of room nights at Booking Holdings in the second quarter, PYMNTS reported. Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the volume from AI agents is too small to draw conclusions, PYMNTS reported.
Seventy percent of consumers are interested in using agentic AI for travel planning, according to “From Assistive to Agentic AI: Consumers Wade Into Autonomous Commerce,” a PYMNTS Intelligence report based on a survey of 2,299 U.S. adult consumers conducted from Nov. 10 to Dec. 10, 2025. The report found 58% of consumers who use dedicated AI platforms prefer to check out inside the platform. That preference rewards whoever owns the checkout, whether that is United, Airbnb or OpenAI.
