Good Sunday morning from Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 3, 2025, is below. Artificial intelligence again generated most of this past week’s headlines (many of which coming out of the recent Destination AI Forum in Washington, D.C.), but social media also made a strong showing. Finally, Seattle’s own AI conference (which wasn’t focused on travel) also featured an interesting announcement. Enjoy.
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- ChatGPT Announces Agentic Commerce. This past week, Seattle (and Madrona Venture Group, where Steve Singh serves as a Managing Director) hosted the IA Summit 2025, an “exclusive gathering of AI founders, researchers and leaders.” OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, spoke on a variety of topics, including the AI platform’s plans for e-commerce and its recent integration with payment platform Stripe. Below are a few highlights from the recent announcement. It’s not a stretch to think that this new tool will soon be made available for travel, underscoring the need for hoteliers to formulate their AI strategy NOW. While recent studies have underscored travelers’ frustration with AI platforms’ inability to support bookings on their platforms without the need to switch applications, last week’s announcement shows that at least one prominent AI platform may be a lot closer to solving that problem.
“More than 700 million people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks, including finding products they love. Starting today, we’re taking the first steps toward ChatGPT helping people buy them too—beginning with Instant Checkout, powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe.”
“U.S. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers right in chat, with over a million Shopify merchants, like Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx and Vuori, coming soon. Today, Instant Checkout supports single-item purchases. Next, we’ll add multi-item carts and expand merchants and regions.”
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- Agoda Launches New Social Media Program – Agoda Ambassadors. Think that we’ve seen the height of influencers’ influence over the industry? Think again. Agoda announced this past week a new program (Agoda Ambassadors) that pays an influencer a commission whenever a traveler books on the Agoda website using a unique promotion code given the influencer. Other features of the new program include new sponsored stays and activities for influencers and marketing campaigns featuring the influencers. Time to re-examine those Agoda contracts?
- How Are Hoteliers Using AI Today? Two recent studies and speakers at last week’s Destination AI Forum seek to provide some preliminary answers. See the stories below.
- Airbnb’s Loyalty Play. All signs point to the short term rental (and soon hotel) booking platform’s introduction of a new loyalty program. What this program will ultimately look like is unknown, but industry analysts believe it will look much more like a membership or subscription program (e.g., Amazon’s Prime program) versus a traditional (“transactional”) program (e.g., Marriott’s Bonvoy program).
- Capital One Travel Hires Industry Veteran. Early last month, Capital One Travel brought on Sarah Kaplan Moore to lead the credit card company’s travel program as the Head of Capital One Travel. Moore joins Capital One after roles with Agoda’s Rocket Travel, Expedia and Vivid Seats. What Moore’s addition might mean for the company’s existing travel partnerships, including its long-standing supplier (and investor) relationship with Hopper is unclear (Moore has indicated that she’s open to all forms of partnerships). Add to this uncertainty the effect of Capital One’s recent acquisition of Discover Financial Services and its 300 million global cardholders.
- Tik Tok Announces Additional Travel Ad Products. Only weeks after its newly announced partnership with Booking.com, Tik Tok has introduced a new advertising solution targeting the travel industry – Travel Ads by Smart+. The Travel Ads program connects users of the social media platform to hotel, destination, flight and cruise promotions while exploring travel related content on the platform. Travel industry members, including Accor, Melia and Expedia, have already participated in program tests. Advertisers seeking to use the program can choose among three options – single videos, catalog videos or catalog carousels.
Have a great week.