Glenn Fogel: Building an AI Travel Agent "Wouldn't Be That Hard." Earning Trust Is.

For hotels and hosts weighing how much of their distribution will flow through AI agents, the CEO of the largest OTA group just gave a number: traffic from large language models is still "significantly below 1%" of Booking.com's room nights.

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel made the comment on stage at the Skift Global Forum in New York, where he was asked about the threat from AI trip-planning agents such as Instinct, which lets users arrange travel by text.

"It wouldn't be that hard"

"If we want to do Instinct, how hard do you think that would be?" Fogel said. "It wouldn't be that hard if that's all you had to do."

His argument is that the transaction is the easy part. The harder part is trust: travelers handing over credit card details and personal data want to deal with an established company and, when something goes wrong, with real people. He questioned who a traveler calls when an LLM booking fails: "do you think there's a number there, a customer service number to call? No."

Fogel called the sub-1% AI traffic figure "a fact" that is "neither positive nor negative," and said he expects commerce through AI agents to grow. When it does, he said, Booking intends to handle the transaction with "some sort of economic relationship at that point."

Five AI bets at once

Booking is hedging anyway. Fogel said the group is running five AI approaches in parallel:

• Priceline's Penny assistant
• Booking.com's assistant and planning features
• An Agoda trip planner
• An incubated AI-native startup
• An unnamed West Coast project

Alongside those sit an advertising deal with OpenAI and an integration with Google's hotel booking tool in AI Mode. Fogel described the approach in venture-capital terms: "most of them are not going to be great, but just one has to be a big winner." He said the startups are valued for their speed, given the risk that large organisations become "bureaucratic and slow-moving."

Connected Trip: "Not yet"

Multi-vertical bookings (flights, hotels and cars bought together) grew at double digits last quarter, more than twice Booking's overall transaction growth. Asked whether the Connected Trip works as advertised today, Fogel said: "Not yet." He pointed to Priceline's Penny reconstructing a disruption and proposing bookable alternatives as the direction of travel.

Airbnb in hotels could send hosts to Booking

Fogel called Airbnb's move into hotels inevitable and suggested it could help Booking. Home-rental hosts who rely on a single platform might "say, 'Oh, well I should get another source of demand,' and they'll come to us." Alternative-accommodation room nights grew 4% in the second quarter, against 5% overall.

Etraveli

Skift also reported that an EU court upheld the block on Booking's proposed acquisition of Etraveli, and that the company has two months to appeal.

Why it matters for operators

Independent hotels supply what Booking describes as the vast majority of its room nights. Fogel's position is that AI agents will become another front door rather than a replacement for the OTA, which means commission economics for most hotels are unlikely to shift quickly. The number to watch is that sub-1% share of room nights, and who takes the margin once it grows.