When AI starts booking the room
How agentic commerce could quietly transform the way travelers plan, choose, and pay for their stays — and what hotels must build before it can truly work
Key takeaways
- Agentic commerce describes AI systems that can plan, decide, and act on behalf of users — potentially managing complete travel bookings end to end.
- Travel is a natural testing ground, yet fragmented data, legacy infrastructure, and limited payment interoperability slow real progress.
- Current implementations in answer engines and retail remain largely assistive, not autonomous — capable of guiding decisions, but rarely completing transactions.
- For hospitality brands, the opportunity lies in opening structured data and APIs so agents can find, understand, and transact with hotels directly.
- Collaboration across the ecosystem — from hotels and GDSs to payment providers and AI platforms — will determine how quickly agentic commerce becomes reality.
A quiet shift toward autonomous travel planning
The idea of agentic commerce is straightforward but profound: intelligent agents that act on behalf of travelers, not just answer their questions.
A traveler might soon ask, “Book me a four-night stay in Lisbon at a small design hotel with vegetarian breakfast options.” The assistant could then research, compare, select, and book — all without human hand-offs.
This represents the next phase of digital travel. We have moved from human search to automated recommendation; agentic commerce extends that logic to automated execution. Yet as Forrester notes, the concept is still forming. The travel industry understands the potential, but few systems today are ready for autonomous interaction.
The current state: complex systems, limited access
Travel remains one of the most interconnected yet fragmented industries.
Hotel data lives across multiple systems — PMS, CRS, channel managers, and GDS — each with its own logic and structure. Many APIs were designed for manual queries, not for autonomous agents to negotiate availability or rates.
Even when answer engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity attempt to “book” hotels, they often redirect users to third-party sites rather than completing a transaction. Payment frameworks add another barrier: card networks and processors are not yet designed to recognize an AI agent as an authorized purchaser.
In other words, the pieces of agentic commerce already exist, but they do not yet fit together.
What could change when they do
If travel achieves agentic commerce, the traditional booking funnel could disappear.
The sequence of search → compare → click → pay would become a single conversation — handled by the traveler’s AI assistant, informed by their preferences, loyalty data, and previous stays.
For hotels, this change is double-edged. Visibility will depend less on advertising or ranking and more on machine readability: how well a property’s data, images, and offers can be understood by an agent. Yet it also opens the possibility of more direct, meaningful connections — if hotels participate as trusted data partners.
In time, travelers might never “visit” a booking site at all. Instead, their AI agents and the hotel’s own commerce agents will exchange structured information, confirm terms, and finalize the stay.
What still stands in the way
Three gaps remain before this vision can mature:
- Standardized data — Hotels need structured, high-quality content and availability data that agents can easily interpret. Many systems still rely on inconsistent or closed formats.
- Payment interoperability — Secure frameworks must allow AI systems to execute payments on behalf of users while respecting consent and compliance rules.
- Transparency and trust — As agents make autonomous choices, travelers must understand how recommendations are generated and which incentives may influence them.
Until these issues are resolved, most “agentic” systems will remain assistive, not autonomous — helpful, but limited to guidance rather than action.
The path forward for hospitality
The most pragmatic next step for hotels is to focus on data readiness. This means ensuring that rates, room descriptions, images, and availability are accessible through open, standardized APIs. It also means aligning with partners — GDS providers, channel managers, and booking platforms — that are actively adapting their systems for agentic integration.
Testing conversational search and recommendation within brand websites can also help hotels understand how guests interact with this new form of discovery. These early efforts will lay the groundwork for more automated bookings later.
Industry-wide, collaboration will be essential. Payments, distribution, and content standards must evolve together to enable trusted agent-to-agent communication. Agentic commerce will only work if all participants — from suppliers to intermediaries — share compatible frameworks for data, consent, and value exchange.
A gradual evolution, not a sudden disruption
Agentic commerce will not replace today’s booking systems overnight. It will emerge gradually, starting with narrow use cases such as itinerary planning or price comparison, and later expanding into direct, automated transactions.
When it does, success for hotels will depend less on competing for attention and more on being understandable and accessible to intelligent systems.
That shift — from human discovery to machine interpretation — may feel abstract today, but it will soon define how guests find and book hotels.
The hospitality industry has always balanced human connection with technological change. Agentic commerce will test that balance again. The hotels that approach it thoughtfully — focusing on openness, transparency, and trust — will find themselves ready when the first truly autonomous booking arrives.
by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today