Company
Booking Holdings is a travel company that owns Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, and Kayak, operating online platforms for lodging, flights, and car rentals.
Booking Holdings plans to invest $100 million in Vayo, a new Seattle travel startup run by serial entrepreneur Mike Fridgen. GeekWire reported the bet is that travel-specific agents plan trips better than general-purpose assistants from OpenAI and Meta.
Reality
Meta's Muse agent passed 5 million downloads in a month as Planet Fitness and Booking, which profit when customers don't compare or cancel, fell 11% to 12%. Retailers have stayed near the index, and their open question is who completes the purchase and keeps the data.
Reality
Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen says AI's returns go to model users who police the bill, with chatbots referring under 1% of room nights. So far, the savings he can point to are inside the company, in customer service and engineering.
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Planet Fitness is down 20% since Meta's Muse agent launched Sept. 8, against 7% for upscale gym Life Time. The gap suggests investors already sort easy cancellations from sticky memberships, though Jim Cramer calls the 'consumer inertia' sell-off too broad.
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Amazon kept Meta's Muse out of its cart with a line in its own terms of service. Investors are already pricing which other intermediaries could say the same thing to an agent.
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Muse passed 2.5 million downloads in its first two weeks. Its flights book through a contracted Duffel API, and its hotels book through a sandboxed browser session that navigates Expedia and Hotels.com.
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Two employer surveys say recent graduates arrive unready, while the low-stakes tasks that used to teach them are the first ones handed to AI. The bench for three years out is a spending decision now.
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Fortune says the market wrongly buried Salesforce, Booking Holdings and IBM. The evidence offered is Agentforce's $1.5 billion of recurring revenue, spread across more than 30,000 contracts.
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