Nobody gets bypassed
Agentic commerce was supposed to route around the OTAs. Google's partner list routes straight through them
The story that traveled through hospitality after Google I/O is a disintermediation story. Agentic AI arrives, the traveler asks an agent, the agent books direct, and the intermediary that has taxed hotel distribution for twenty years finally gets cut out. One widely syndicated hospitality analysis, published days after the keynote, put it almost exactly that way — Google routing high-intent travelers to brand.com, bypassing the OTAs. It is a satisfying story — the one the industry has wanted to tell since agentic AI arrived.
But the announcement it rests on says something else.
Start with the partner list. The companies named to carry agentic hotel booking — first in November, unchanged since — are Booking.com, Expedia, Marriott, IHG, Choice, and Wyndham. Two of those are the largest online travel agencies on earth. A disintermediation play does not launch with the parties it intends to disintermediate as its founding partners. If Google were paving a road around the OTAs, Booking and Expedia would not be laying the asphalt.
So this is not disintermediation. It is the opposite: not the removal of a layer, but the addition of one.
What got added
What Google introduced at I/O was a cart that lives across every surface it owns — Search, Gemini, YouTube, Gmail — with a protocol and a payment rail to close transactions inside it. Strip the product language and the shape is plain: a single commerce surface sitting above every merchant, reachable from everywhere a traveler already is.
The trade press read the consequence without flinching. PhocusWire put it directly: travel sellers will need to integrate into these rails or be invisible to the agents transacting on a traveler's behalf — which means leaning further into Google's ecosystem, not less. TechCrunch named the prize plainly: control over more of the shopping journey, and over the relationship between the consumer and the merchants competing for attention.
That relationship is the asset. Not the transaction — the relationship. The transaction can stay with the merchant; the protocol is built to leave the brand as merchant of record. What moves is the surface where the traveler arrives at the decision, and the record of everything they considered along the way. Those move to Google. The merchant keeps the booking and the liability. Google keeps the customer.
The established players aren't resisting. They're racing.
The clearest evidence that this is the real shape comes from the established players themselves — and it is not defensive.
On Booking Holdings' first-quarter call in April, an analyst asked Glenn Fogel directly whether he was encouraged or concerned by what the AI engines were doing. Fogel said Booking was "incredibly excited about the position." He went further. The AI platforms drifting toward a performance-marketing model struck him as good news — it is the model Booking has spent two decades mastering with Google. He framed AI as a way to expand the market rather than a threat to it, and confirmed Booking is working with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon at the same time. The fear that chatbots would disintermediate the OTAs had driven part of Booking's own share-price slide earlier in the year. Management's answer to that fear was to lean in harder.
But leaning in is only half of what Booking is doing. The other half is building its own agents — Penny on Priceline, an expanding booking agent on Booking.com, and Lola, a separate stealth venture it spun up this spring with Kayak's co-founders — so that when the traveler delegates, they delegate inside Booking's environment rather than someone else's. The CFO put the urgency plainly: move as fast as possible to give travelers the full experience in-house, framed not as protecting the direct channel but as expanding it.
Read that move closely, because it gives the whole game away. Booking's defense against the demand relationship migrating into an agent is to build the agent. Which concedes the only point that matters: the booking is moving into an agent. The contested question is not whether. It is whose.
Google is building the cross-merchant agent that sits above everyone. Booking is building the in-house agent that keeps its own travelers in. Both are re-intermediation. Both add a layer that was not there in 2025.
The wrong event
The industry has spent a decade bracing for the wrong event.
The recurring fear was always that Google would become an OTA — that it would start holding inventory, contracting hotels, and selling rooms in direct competition with Booking and Expedia. It never did. It is not doing it now. What it is doing is more durable than becoming an OTA, precisely because it carries none of the operational weight. Google is becoming the layer the OTAs book through. The surface above the surface.
And that surface gets monetized the way every Google surface eventually does. This part is not speculation; it is the pattern. Hotel search arrived free and grew a paid tier above it. Metasearch placement did the same. The auction has always followed the surface, and an agentic cart is a new surface. There is no reason to expect the auction to skip it — and the named partners, who already buy their visibility from Google today, have no reason to expect it either. That is part of why they are comfortable. They have been the inventory beneath a Google demand surface for twenty years. This is that, moved up one floor.
Where everyone lands
What changes is each player's position relative to the new floor.
The OTAs move from occupying the demand surface to supplying one — still indispensable for inventory, payments, and the messy post-booking work an agent cannot do, but a step further from the traveler than they were. The chains on the same partner list are betting their brands are strong enough to be the name an agent reaches for. The independents inherit whatever terms get set above them, as they always have.
Whether the established players can resist that repositioning — extract favorable terms on the way in, use their inventory leverage to stay more than a supplier — is the open question, and it is genuinely open. Booking's two-front strategy is an attempt to answer it. Whether it works is not something this announcement decides, and anyone claiming to know is guessing. What the announcement decides is the direction: a layer is forming, and the inventory is moving in under it willingly.
So the question the disintermediation story asks — who gets cut out — is the wrong question. Nobody gets cut out. The OTAs are on the list. The chains are on the list. The agents will route through them, not around them.
The right question is quieter. When the surface belongs to Google and the inventory belongs to everyone else, who owns the relationship with the traveler? The stack just grew a new top floor. The booking still happens. It just happens one level up from where it used to — and the party standing on the new floor is the one that was there all along.
by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today
Read also: Hotels in the cart
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