AI Agents Challenge Travel Platforms for Control of the Journey

AI assistants are moving beyond travel inspiration and search toward comparison, booking and payment, threatening the gateway role long held by search engines and online travel agencies. Pablo Delgado, managing partner and CEO for the Americas at hotel technology company Mirai, says a conversational interface could compress discovery, consideration and transaction into one exchange, shifting control over customer data, distribution economics and the booking relationship.

In The Hotel Yearbook 2026 Technology Edition, Delgado said OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are pursuing different routes to connect assistants with travel tools. Hotels will need structured rates, availability, policies, application programming interfaces and standards such as MCP so agents can evaluate and transact directly. The report disclosed no investment amount or transaction volume, while warning that liability for failed reservations, flight cancellations and in-trip support remains unresolved.