Agentic commerce is slow to catch on everywhere, not only in travel.
Walmart converted a third as well inside ChatGPT, eBay banned buy-for-me agents, and Shopify says shoppers only started letting agents buy this quarter.
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. On recent earnings calls, Airbnb's Brian Chesky reported "very, very low numbers" of bookings from Meta's Muse and Instinct agents, and DoorDash's Tony Xu counted "maybe several hundred orders in total" from personal AI assistants. Booking Holdings chief executive Glenn Fogel said "the adoption of these horizontal personal agents may be much slower than is anticipated," Semafor reported. Booking Holdings has reasons of its own to say so. The travel figures are in our piece from November 9. Retail tells the same story, with harder numbers.
Walmart converted a third as well inside ChatGPT. Walmart put about 200,000 products into ChatGPT's in-chat checkout in November 2025. Purchases completed inside ChatGPT converted at about a third of the rate of shoppers who clicked through to Walmart.com, Walmart executive Daniel Danker told WIRED in March. Etsy, another early partner, told Modern Retail the feature did not generate a large volume of sales. Walmart pulled back. Its own shopping assistant, Sparky, now runs inside ChatGPT, where shoppers log into their Walmart account and the sale goes through Walmart's own system. OpenAI shelved its in-chat checkout the same month, as we covered then.
eBay banned the agent that buys alone. Since February 20, eBay's user agreement bars "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" unless eBay gives permission.
Shopify: 3.3 times the orders, and the first agents buying. Orders reaching Shopify merchants from AI channels were up 3.3 times year over year in the third quarter, president Harley Finkelstein said on the company's November earnings call. Many of them are shoppers an AI sent straight to a store's product page, and Shopify says they convert 64% more often. He called the third quarter the first time shoppers experimented with letting personal agents buy for them. Shopify doesn't disclose what share of its orders AI accounts for. Its chief financial officer, Jeff Hoffmeister, told investors at a Goldman Sachs conference that definitions of agentic commerce "vary from vendor to vendor."
Hundreds of purchases at Visa, 3% at merchants. Visa's agent milestone in December 2025 was hundreds of purchases completed in closed pilots. In a survey by Checkout.com, which sells payment processing, U.S. and UK merchants said AI agents were involved in 3% of their transactions.
The catch. It's early, and Shopify's AI orders are growing fast. Most of the figures here are self-reported or come from companies selling into the answer. "Agentic" means something different at every company that uses the word. And every platform reporting a small number from outside agents is building its own.
What it means for hotels. In every case above, the AI found the shopper and the merchant's own checkout made the sale. Walmart took its checkout back. Shopify routes the agents through its merchants' checkout. eBay lets only the agents it approves place an order.
For a hotel, that checkout is the booking engine. It's where the guest an AI sent lands, and where the booking is still yours to win.
Read also: Why AI agents aren't booking your rooms yet
Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →