Expedia says you’ll soon be able to book a hotel without leaving Meta’s AI agent, Hospitality.Today reports. Whether a hotel can get the same treatment is much less clear.
Hospitality.Today says Meta launched the agent, called Muse, on September 8, and that Expedia announced on September 22 that travelers will be able to tell Muse what they want and get room types, availability and rates back, then book through Expedia inside the chat. Travel Noire’s example is a hotel with a pool in Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. The wording is “coming soon to the U.S.” There’s no date.
The hotel side is where it gets interesting. The trade site reports that Meta picked and built its list of direct hookups itself, and that “Meta publishes no way for a hotel to ask for the same hookup.” A hotel can still be reached by a back route, if its booking system lets software finish a reservation without a person, but the guest has to know to connect it. The difference the article draws: an Expedia booking happens entirely in the chat, while a direct hotel booking can stall whenever a login or an approval comes up.
Meta’s own platform page doesn’t settle it. It has a link to submit a connector and a review process, and says nothing about who is allowed to use them. We wrote about that page earlier. We couldn’t tell from it whether a hotel can apply.