Sarah · Sep 21, 2026 · 2 min read
An opinion piece argues Booking.com's payment model lets it show guests prices below what hotels load, affecting roughly one in five independent room nights.
Brian Chesky says Airbnb's relaunched Experiences business found its footing in Paris by selling to residents, not just tourists, growing bookings there sixfold year over year, a strategy rivals like Viator and GetYourGuide have largely ignored.
Expedia has cut 58 jobs including a 15-year hotel partnerships lead, part of a broader push by CEO Ariane Gorin to simplify the org and cut costs.
A new Agoda-commissioned survey finds AI coding agents now run in production for a majority of developers across Southeast Asia and India, though cost and codebase readiness remain real limits.
Trip.com Group's corporate travel arm Trip.Biz has launched Agent ONE, four AI agents claiming to cut booking time by 90% and approval time to seconds, though the numbers are all self-reported.
Airbnb will launch its own AI agent next year, Brian Chesky told Skift Global Forum, adding that the interface will be "much richer than a chatbot."
lastminute.com's new Travel Horizons report identifies AI-assisted "holiday maxing," using AI tools to squeeze more value or more trip out of a fixed budget and set of days off, as a defining trend in how Europeans are planning travel.
Expedia is now available inside Meta's Muse agent, yet CEO Ariane Gorin told Skift Global Forum she doesn't expect most bookings to become end-to-end conversations.
A new agreement gives Airbnb's engineering and product teams broader access to OpenAI frontier models, including GPT-6 Astra, via OpenAI's APIs and Amazon Bedrock.
At Skift Global Forum, Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel played down AI booking agents, said LLM traffic is "significantly below 1%" of room nights, and pitched Airbnb's hotel push as a possible win for Booking.
Airbnb's new 'Farm to Stay' grants target agritourism supply, backed by data showing US farm stays earned nearly $120 million on the platform in 2025.
Dara Khosrowshahi told Skift Global Forum that Uber's hotel bookings run at break-even by design, funding 10-20% Uber One discounts, with Vrbo rentals arriving later this year and flights on hold.