Why OpenAI bought an AI travel agent

In March, OpenAI gave up booking hotels inside ChatGPT. Now it has hired someone who knows how.

by Markus Busch

Odessia opened to the public on October 14. On November 10, its founder, Francis Davidson, announced that OpenAI had acquired it and that he was joining OpenAI "to focus on the future of travel." By the next morning the website carried one notice. OpenAI has acquired Odessia, the service is no longer available, and travelers with existing bookings should contact support.

Neither side has disclosed a price. OpenAI has published no announcement of its own, named no travel product and did not answer Skift or TechCrunch. What it bought is on the record, though, and it adds something ChatGPT didn't have.

A licensed travel agent you reached by text

Odessia was a free AI concierge. A traveler sent it a text, and it planned and booked flights, hotels and experiences in one conversation. Connect a Gmail inbox and it read years of booking confirmations to learn how you like to travel. After the booking, it kept watching the price. It earned its money on commission, like any agency.

Odessia was accredited by IATA as a travel agent, which gave it the rates and perks hotels keep for agencies. Its launch post promised breakfast, a $100 credit, a room upgrade and late check-out at about 2,000 hotels. That figure is Odessia's own, and nobody has checked it. It also wrote its own guides to hundreds of thousands of hotels, scoring each on everything from street noise to gym equipment, Skift reported.

The company was small: eight people in San Francisco and a $6 million round led by Sequoia in June. Davidson says he built much of the product by directing teams of AI agents.

He also knows the hotel side of the counter. He co-founded Sonder in 2014 and ran it for a decade, leasing apartments and hotel units in cities around the world, until he stepped down in June 2025. Sonder shut down on November 10, 2025, a year to the day before the deal, after Marriott ended its licensing agreement.

Davidson says Odessia planned more than $60 million a year of travel for tens of thousands of early users over the summer. That is his number, and "planned" is not "booked."

OpenAI now owns its own travel agent

ChatGPT already sells hotels, through other companies. Booking.com and Expedia were among the first apps inside ChatGPT when OpenAI opened its app platform in October 2025. A traveler sees their rooms and rates in the answer, then finishes the booking on their sites.

OpenAI tried to take that last step itself and backed off. In March it shelved checkout inside ChatGPT after finding that people researched in the chatbot but didn't buy there, and it sent the purchase back to the apps, which we covered then. Since then OpenAI has started selling advertising. Expedia told investors on November 4 that it is buying it.

Odessia fills the gap those partnerships leave. Skift's reading of the deal is that OpenAI gets a team that built a booking agent end to end, an agency accreditation and hotel content. Until now, OpenAI left all three to Booking.com and Expedia.

OpenAI has given no reason of its own. When it launched ChatGPT agent in July 2025, it named travel among the jobs the agent could do. TechCrunch called the deal an acqui-hire, a purchase made mainly for the people.

Expedia fell as much as 5% on the report

The OTAs' investors read it as a threat. On November 10, after The Information reported the deal, Expedia Group fell as much as 5% during the session, Booking Holdings as much as 3% and Airbnb as much as 3.5%, Investing.com reported.

The same investors went the other way in March. The day OpenAI shelved its checkout, Expedia rose 13.7% and Booking Holdings 8.5%, Reuters reported. The OTAs, they concluded, would stay the place where an AI booking gets finished.

In the weeks before the deal, all three companies told investors that outside AI agents barely book. Booking Holdings put them at under 1% of room nights. Airbnb called them "very non-material." Expedia's chief executive, Ariane Gorin, said agent traffic is very small. On November 10, a free service that had been open for 27 days, and was already shut, weighed more with investors than all three figures.

For the OTAs, the license is the signal. Their seat inside ChatGPT rests on OpenAI needing someone to complete the sale. A company that holds its own agency accreditation needs them less.

The catch

OpenAI has announced no travel product. It has not said what it will do with Odessia's accreditation, or whether that accreditation passes to a new owner at all. Davidson wrote only that there would be "more to share on the shape of the future soon." The service is closed. The perk list, the 2,000 hotels, the 2.6 million properties and the $60 million all come from the companies involved.

OpenAI also has a habit of buying small teams and closing their products. Convogo, Roi and Crossing Minds went that way.

A B2B supplier ran Odessia's hotel bookings

Odessia did not book hotels on its own. Nuitée, a B2B hotel supplier, ran its hotel search, live pricing, reservations and customer support, Nuitée's chief executive, Mohamed Benmansour, told Skift. Nuitée says it has live rates for more than 2.6 million properties. It draws them from wholesalers and other suppliers, and from hotels that contract with it directly.

So a room Odessia sold could reach an independent hotel from a supplier the hotel has never dealt with, at a rate the hotel once gave a wholesaler. Nothing on the booking needs to say an AI made it. The agency perks are a separate layer, and they applied only at hotels that grant them.

Benmansour said it is too early to say how Odessia's setup could fit into OpenAI, and that Nuitée would welcome a bigger role. For now, that makes Nuitée the hotel supplier already wired into a booking agent OpenAI owns.

Skift put into words what the OTAs' investors sold on. A ChatGPT that plans and books trips on its own would turn Booking.com and Expedia into its suppliers, Skift argued, and could give hotels a way around them. Odessia already had the parts: its own license, a supplier that also signs hotels directly, and its own guides to hundreds of thousands of hotels.

In March, OpenAI handed the hotel booking back to the OTAs. Eight months later, it hired a founder who had built his own.

Read also: OpenAI just saved Booking.com · Why AI agents aren't booking your rooms yet

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