Adriana Lee

Priceline is turning Penny from a single chatbot into an interface for a squad of agents. It's the latest platform turning to multi-agent architecture for travel.

Travel search was built around a useful limit: people eventually stop looking. AI agents don’t. That turns comparison shopping into a cost problem for airlines, intermediaries, metasearch, and hotels trying to keep control of demand.

In his first media interview as Expedia’s Chief AI and Data Officer, Xavier Amatriain gives a rare look at the logic shaping one of travel’s most closely watched AI strategies. 

Sarah Kopit and Adriana Lee break down why the travel industry may not actually be ready for AI despite the rush to adopt it.

Mews and SiteMinder are bringing distribution and hotel operations into one platform. The goal: Break down the hotel data silos that complicate AI adoption in the agentic age.

Brand recognition, a cognitive shortcut for human buying decisions, means nothing to AI agents that can reason through every option every time. That's shifting travel's entire marketing apparatus.

Expedia hasn’t said much publicly about when its B2B MCP server will arrive. Now an executive says it’s expected in months — a key step toward letting partners’ AI agents connect directly to Expedia’s travel inventory.

Google has been building toward agentic hotel booking in plain sight. Now it's said so out loud.

Expedia isn't reinventing the OTA. It's stretching the definition — upstream into inspiration, downstream into day-of-travel — so booking becomes one stop in a longer relationship.

Hotel owners see operating-cost inflation grinding margins. One third-party manager is publicly betting that AI and other technologies are the most promising route back to profitability.