Booking.com's parent launched Vayo. It tells your guests when you get cheaper.
A new AI travel agent from Booking Holdings reads your guests' confirmations, direct bookings included, and flags cheaper nights
by Markus Busch
Driving the news. Booking Holdings launched Vayo on October 14, its second standalone AI company in about two weeks, after Lola. It is in private beta, free, and open by invitation from a waitlist. The parent plans to put $100 million into it, a figure its release ties to the product's progress and to market conditions. Mike Fridgen, Vayo's CEO and co-founder, runs it out of Seattle.
It reads the confirmation, then keeps going. Vayo connects to the traveler's inbox and pulls in her travel confirmations. Lola does the same, which we have covered before. The difference is what happens next. Vayo builds the trip and keeps watching it. GeekWire reports that it monitors bookings for price drops and for openings at hotels that were sold out. If a flight slips, it flags the late check-in.
It does this whatever the channel. Booking Holdings' release says Vayo covers reservations made on other platforms and directly with hotels. Fridgen named Expedia as one of them, to both Skift and PhocusWire.
10 euros cheaper nearby, 4.7% likelier to cancel. That figure comes from a study we reported in September: more than two million bookings at 327 Mallorca hotels, published in Tourism Management in June. When a similar hotel in the same area got 10 euros cheaper, the chance of a cancellation rose 4.7%. Guests on flexible rates keep shopping. Until now, they did the checking themselves.
Vayo does it for them. Two moments matter for a hotel. You lower your rate, and a guest holding a refundable booking at the old price gets told. Or the hotel she wanted was full when she booked yours, a room opens there, and she hears about it.
The second one is new. BCD Travel already re-shops corporate bookings and rebooks the same room at your lower rate. The room stays yours. Vayo can point the guest at another hotel.
Aimed at the guests who spend the most. Vayo says its first users are frequent leisure travelers who plan trips for family and friends. Its own research, as reported by Skift, puts them at a single-digit share of travelers and 27% to 30% of travel spend. That figure is Vayo's, and nobody has checked it.
The catch. Today Vayo watches. It doesn't sell hotel rooms yet. When a hotel price drops, PhocusWire reports, it prompts the guest to act on her own. Restaurant reservations through OpenTable already work inside the product, and Fridgen told Skift that broader booking should start within weeks, through integrations. None of the coverage says whose rooms Vayo will sell or what commission they will carry. No revenue model has been disclosed. The beta is small and invite-only, and the $100 million is a plan, not a payment.
What it means for hotels. The free-cancellation window on your refundable direct rates now runs under an agent that never stops checking the price, yours and the hotel down the street. The same Mallorca study found non-refundable bookings were 82% less likely to cancel than fully refundable ones. The share of your direct bookings sitting on refundable rates is how much of your house this agent can reach.
Once Vayo starts booking hotels, the next thing to watch is where a guest goes after it tells her about a cheaper night.
Vayo's website says it "works for you, not for any one site." It belongs to Booking Holdings.
Read also: BCD rebooks your room when it finds it cheaper · Booking.com now gets paid by both sides
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