In China, the AI agent can already sell Marriott's afternoon tea
On Alibaba's Fliggy, Marriott has its own door for AI agents, and it sells more than rooms through it: a preview of how the big brands will meet the agents
by Markus Busch
Earlier this week we looked at how little AI agents book in hotels so far. Outside China, that holds. In China, agents are already taking orders, and one hotel company has shown what a big brand does when the agents arrive.
Marriott's answer was a door of its own inside the agent tool of Fliggy, Alibaba's travel platform. Through that door an AI agent can search Marriott hotels by brand and by name, and sell Marriott's packages: the afternoon tea, the spa deal. Every other hotel in Fliggy's catalog, chain or independent, goes through one shared room search.
Orders in the millions, hotels not in the count
The number that travels is 200 million. That is roughly how many orders Alibaba's Qwen AI app handled during the Spring Festival holiday in February, by Alibaba's own count. Hangzhou's city government broke it down: 55 million cups of milk tea, 35 million cups of fruit tea, 11 million cups of coffee.
Travel came after the drinks. Fliggy said its AI bookings rose more than 800 percent over the holiday, led by attraction tickets. It said conversion on air, train and attraction tickets now matches the established OTAs. It published no hotel figure.
So China confirms what we found closer to home: agents take orders, and the hotel share is not yet a number anyone discloses. What China adds is the wiring.
Marriott got a door. Everyone else got a search box.
In March, Fliggy released a free piece of software that lets any AI agent search and book from its catalog. No account, no API key. Anyone can install it from GitHub, and Fliggy is putting it into the skill stores of Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and Honor phones, where a traveler's AI assistant can use it without opening the Fliggy app.
The instructions list eight commands. Two search across everything Fliggy sells. One each covers flights, trains and attractions. One searches hotels. The last two belong to Marriott: one finds Marriott hotels by destination, brand or hotel name, the other finds Marriott packages, which the instructions illustrate with afternoon tea and spa deals.
The door is nine years in the making. In August 2017, Alibaba and Marriott set up a joint venture to run Marriott's storefront on Fliggy and link the two loyalty programs. When Fliggy wrote instructions for AI agents, the storefront came with commands of its own.
Marriott is not alone on Fliggy. IHG, Hilton and Hyatt run flagship stores there too, and each passed RMB 100 million in sales during Fliggy's summer sale in 2024. None of them has a command in the agent tool. A store gets a brand onto the platform. It does not get the brand a door for the agents.
The agent can sell the outlets
This is the part a hotelier should read twice.
A guest tells her phone she wants a nice afternoon in Shanghai. Through the Marriott door, the agent can find the afternoon tea at a Marriott hotel and return it with a booking link. Spa packages work the same way. A Marriott hotel's outlets reach the agent as products, priced and bookable, alongside the rooms.
Through the shared hotel search, an agent can filter on five things: star rating, bed type, price, property type and distance to an attraction. That is the whole vocabulary. A hotel with the best terrace bar in the city, a Sunday brunch locals queue for and a spa that sells out on weekends shows up as a four-star with king beds, at a price, 800 meters from the Bund.
A brand can hand the agent its restaurant, its spa and its packages. Everyone else hands over a room.
The same pattern, one ocean over
On August 27, Google started rolling out hotel booking inside AI Mode in the US. Ten companies could take a booking there: Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline and Trip.com, plus Choice, Hilton, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham. Five OTAs, five chains. The chains did here what Marriott did on Fliggy. They joined the platform's booking flow at launch, under their own names.
Fliggy shows what comes after launch day. Once a brand is inside, its door grows wider than a room search. Packages and outlets have not been announced for AI Mode. On Fliggy they have shipped.
One door for the flag, five fields for the rest
If you fly a flag, ask your brand two questions in writing. Is your property loaded behind the brand's door on each AI platform the brand has joined? And are your packages loaded, not only your rooms? An afternoon tea the agent cannot find is an afternoon tea it cannot sell.
If you run an independent, an agent shopping Fliggy reads your hotel through five fields, however good your listing is. If guests from China matter to you, ask your revenue manager how your hotel reaches Fliggy, through Agoda or a wholesaler, and at what rate. The agent sells the rate that partner passes on.
Rooms first, then the rest of the hotel
On Fliggy, Marriott went from a storefront to commands an AI agent can call, packages included. In Google's AI Mode the chains are at the start of the same road: rooms at launch, points prices for Choice, Hilton and Wyndham, Accor and Hyatt named next.
The road runs one way. The big brands are bringing the hotel to where the agents shop, one piece at a time: the room, then the points, then the afternoon tea, the spa and the table in the restaurant. Every piece a brand hands over is one more thing the agent can sell for its hotels, and one more thing an unbranded hotel still has to sell on its own.
Read also: The AI guest is still rare · Your rate now competes with a points price inside Google's answer
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