Good Saturday afternoon from sunny Seattle . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, April 3, 2026, is below. This week’s Update features a variety of stories, including an update from Amazon and its plans for Alexa Plus and travel. Enjoy.
-
- Amazon Seeks to Collapse Travel Discovery and Booking into a Single Platform. It has been a while since we’ve seen an update from Amazon and its plans for its AI user interface, Alexa Plus. Given the recent announcements by both OpenAI and Google regarding their somewhat divergent plans for their AI platforms (and specifically, purchases/bookings on their platforms), Amazon’s latest announcement was quite timely. This past week Amazon announced that Alexa Plus now has the ability to order food through Grubhub and Uber Eats. More importantly, according to the announcement, the new functionality (and supporting architecture) is intended to handle the full transaction from browsing to payment. So what about travel? According to the announcement, travel planning is one of several future possible uses of the new commerce architecture. For now, the pizza order and delivery functionality is limited to Echo devices with screens.
- Six Weeks and One Hundred Million Dollars. Only six weeks after OpenAI’s commencement of an advertising pilot on its popular ChatGPT platform, OpenAI announced it had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue from the pilot. With that kind of immediate success, it is no surprise that OpenAI is rapidly building out its advertising infrastructure through recent hires and announced partnerships with Smartly and Criteo. Think advertising on popular AI platforms is a thing of the future? Think again.
- What About Corporate and Managed Travel? Like so many others following the rapid rise of AI and its effects on travel, we’ve been largely focused on AI’s effects on leisure travel. What about corporate and managed travel? Changes are coming.
- Hoteliers and Amadeus Obtain District Court’s Dismissal of Anti-Trust Case. This past week, an Illinois federal district court dismissed a proposed class action by guests alleging that hoteliers’ sharing of certain future occupancy information through Amadeus’ Demand360 product violated federal antitrust laws. The proposed class action was one of several similar cases brought over the past year or two against hoteliers, casino owners/operators and multi-family owners. Citing a Seventh Circuit decision, the Illinois court held that while the sharing of information can be evidence of an illegal conspiracy, sharing alone is not sufficient evidence of an actual agreement. For our law nerd readers, we’ve linked below the court’s opinion and dismissal order.
Have a great week everyone.