AI’s travel gatekeepers
Booking.com and Expedia are quietly rebuilding their dominance inside AI assistants — and hotels risk losing direct access to guests all over again
A new power shift is unfolding in travel. As AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity become the primary gateways for discovery and booking, Booking.com and Expedia have embedded themselves at the center of this new ecosystem. Without regulation, they could dominate the AI-driven travel funnel — turning hotels once again into renters of their own guest relationships.
Key takeaways
- AI duopoly emerging: Booking.com and Expedia have rapidly integrated into OpenAI’s ecosystem, giving them early control over how travelers search and book through AI assistants.
- Unregulated gatekeepers: The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) doesn’t yet apply to stand-alone AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini, allowing them to operate without fairness or transparency requirements.
- Opaque distribution power: AI tools don’t just answer queries — they now decide which hotels appear, at what price, and in what order, creating a new kind of algorithmic monopoly.
- Hotels at risk: Independent hotels may soon lose visibility inside AI-generated results unless regulators extend DMA-style protections to AI assistants acting as travel gateways.
- Scale and data advantage: Expedia already reaches 10 million daily visitors across 200 sites; when paired with AI integration, that reach could translate into billions of behavioral signals powering preferential placement.
- Call for action: Industry stakeholders must push for regulatory safeguards, data transparency, and open access so that hotels can compete fairly in AI-driven channels before control consolidates again.
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