Online Travel: AI Agents are here. Who wins now?

AI Agents are finally here. Over the last year, we have written about the impact AI and agents could have on the travel distribution landscape, presenting the opportunities, the risks and the unknowns. Now that agentic travel booking is live, the picture is a little clearer; agents are able to complete bookings on users' behalf without redirecting to a hotel/OTA website, they can compare prices across booking channels, and they are (for now) completing bookings at zero cost. This presents three challenges to the OTA business model: (1) disintermediation if the agents can go directly to the supplier and OTA scale gives it less advantage than in the previous funnel; (2) take rate pressure from competing with lower cost channels and a lost ability to influence customer behavior towards higher take rate hotels;