Airbnb and Vrbo aren't building for AI agents. Expedia and Booking.com are.

TLDR

• Agentic search, queries an AI assistant resolves and books rather than a human clicking through results, grew from single-digit percentages of travel queries around 2023 to more than 50% today, according to Skift's Good Morning Hospitality podcast.
• Booking Holdings named OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Amazon as AI partners on its Q1 2026 earnings call, and Expedia Group opened its inventory to those same platforms through a new MCP server in May 2026. Airbnb and Vrbo have announced no equivalent.
• The shift to track: distribution power is moving from which app a guest opens to which OTA's API the guest's AI agent calls first.

Skift's Good Morning Hospitality podcast, hosted by Wil Slickers and published July 6, 2026, flags a structural shift independent hotels haven't priced in yet. Agentic search has grown from single-digit percentages of travel search three years ago to more than 50% today. Booking.com and Expedia are racing to become the infrastructure those agents call when they search and book. Airbnb and Vrbo are not in that race, at least not yet.

Booking.com and Expedia are building the API layer AI agents call for hotel inventory.

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel told investors on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call that the company works with "OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon" on AI capabilities, on top of its own in-house assistant, Penny. Expedia Group went further on May 25, 2026, when CEO Ariane Gorin unveiled an MCP server that lets an AI agent, whether built on OpenAI, Google, or Amazon's models, query Expedia's inventory directly. Both moves point the same direction: the OTA wants to be the backend an AI agent calls, not the app a guest has to open.

Picture a 40-room independent hotel listed on Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb, taking roughly 1,200 bookings a year split evenly across those three channels. If AI-agent bookings reach 20% of total travel bookings within 18 months, in line with the trajectory Good Morning Hospitality describes, that hotel could see roughly 240 of its annual bookings originate from an AI agent's query rather than a direct search. Because the hotel is listed on Booking.com and Expedia, most of those 240 bookings still reach it, since the agent's API call reaches those platforms directly. List on the API-connected platforms and 240 bookings stay visible. List on Airbnb alone, and they depend on a habit nobody has measured yet.

Airbnb is betting its proprietary platform and brand hold up better than an open API.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and newly appointed CTO Ahmad Al-Dahle, who joined from Meta after building its Llama models, have described a 2026 AI strategy built around Airbnb's own dataset and app, not third-party API access. Chesky has said Airbnb's advantage lies in handling "the edge cases of global payments and insurance" that a general-purpose chatbot cannot replicate, and the company is tuning AI models on 500 million of its own reviews and support interactions to keep that advantage inside its ecosystem. Vrbo, owned by Expedia Group, sits in between: it runs on Expedia's backend, but the MCP server announcement in May did not name Vrbo specifically among the inventory opened to agents.

That strategy works if guests keep opening the Airbnb app directly rather than asking an AI agent to handle the search. Consider two identical guests planning the same weekend trip. The first opens the Airbnb app out of habit and books the same 40-room hotel from the earlier example. The second asks ChatGPT to find and book a place to stay, and ChatGPT's booking connection resolves through whichever API responds fastest and widest, which today points toward Booking.com or Expedia rather than Airbnb. Airbnb wins the first guest on brand. It has no path to the second guest unless that guest chooses to bypass the agent entirely.

The framework: API-reachable inventory versus brand-reachable inventory.

Two categories now describe how a hotel's inventory can be found. API-reachable inventory sits on a platform, like Booking.com or Expedia, that has built or is building a connection an AI agent can query directly, so the property can surface inside an agent-mediated search without the guest ever opening that platform's app. Brand-reachable inventory sits on a platform, like Airbnb, that a guest has to choose to open directly, so the property only surfaces if the guest's own habits route them there. Most independent hotels today have some presence in both categories. The open question is how much weight each category carries as agentic search keeps growing.

Independent hotels face this differently than branded chains, and US and European properties face it on different timelines.

Branded chains have direct-booking apps with loyalty programs built to keep guests inside the brand's own ecosystem, giving them a third option beyond API-reachable and brand-reachable OTA inventory. Independent hotels rarely have that app infrastructure, which makes their OTA listings carry more of the AI-agent exposure than a chain's would. The timeline also differs by region. Booking.com holds a larger share of independent-hotel distribution across the UK and continental Europe than in the US, where Expedia and Airbnb both carry more weight. A European property's AI-agent exposure runs mostly through Booking.com's API build-out. A US property's exposure splits more evenly across Expedia and Booking.com.

Three things to do this quarter: confirm your API-side listing, test AI surfacing, and track voice and chat bookings.

• Confirm your property is indexed on Booking.com or Expedia alongside Airbnb: if you're listed only on Airbnb or Vrbo, set up a Booking.com or Expedia listing this quarter, even if those channels don't drive material bookings today.
• Test how AI tools surface your property right now: ask ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Alexa to find a hotel in your market, and note whether your property appears and which platform the response seems to be pulling from.
• Track what share of bookings arrive through voice or chat interfaces over the next two quarters: Booking.com and Expedia both offer voice- and chat-booking integrations already, so a rising share there is your earliest signal that AI-agent booking is becoming material.