Duff on Hospitality Law

Good Sunday morning from Seattle (actually, about 180 miles south of Seattle at one of Marriott’s new Post Card Cabins in Glennwood, Washington) . . . Our weekly Online Travel Update for the week ending Friday, October 10, 2025, is below. This week’s OTU includes recent product updates from both Expedia Group (Hotels.com) and Booking Holdings (Booking.com) as well as several perspectives on the major “app” announcement that came out of last week’s OpenAI Development Conference. Enjoy.

• • Hotels.com Introduces New “Immediate” Loyalty Program Feature. Expedia Group’s Hotels.com has introduced a new loyalty feature (Save Your Way) that allows members of Expedia Group’s loyalty program, One Key, to use loyalty program discounts immediately when booking on Hotels.com or redeem them later for a booking on Hotels.com, Expedia or VRBO. Hotels.com claims that the feature is a first of its kind. According to Expedia, early results suggest that the new feature is proving most popular among business travelers who elect to use the discount immediately. Here’s my immediate reaction . . . This is simply rate discounting, and for many suppliers, unauthorized rate discounting. Bigger picture, will this new discount appear on search and meta search site results? If yes, how do suppliers handle the resulting parity fall out? Finally, how are competing intermediaries likely to react to this new feature? Time to check those contracts everyone.

• • Both Expedia and Booking.com Introduce New AI Powered Features. Both Expedia and Booking.com introduced last week a suite of new AI features for both travelers and the platforms’ supplier partners. Among its many announced new features, Booking.com has introduced Smart Messenger and Auto Reply to “improve” communications between suppliers and their guests.  Expedia has announced Lodging Sponsored Listings API, a new advertising tool for Expedia’s B2B partners.   

• • OpenAI Partners with Expedia and Booking.com to Launch ChatGPT Apps. The big announcement in online travel last week came out of OpenAI’s annual development conference on Monday. ChatGPT has become an app “platform” open to third party developers. As part of the announcement, Expedia and Booking.com both announced new ChatGPT apps (with a TripAdvisor app soon to follow) that allow users of the AI platform to browse, select and ultimately book accommodations on the ChatGPT platform. (As we have noted in prior Updates, the inability to actually book travel without leaving a chosen AI platform has been noted in several studies as a source of frustration for AI users generally) To access the OTAs’ content, users must first type in the name of the app (e.g., “Expedia” or “Booking.com”) into their prompt or, and this where things get really interesting, the platform will suggest an app that the platform believes is most responsive to users’ prompt if no app is specified. Connectivity between ChatGPT and the OTAs is provided via Model Context Protocol (MCP). The offerings are currently available to ChatGPT users (Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans) outside the EU. Industry reactions to the announcement have been mixed – from wild hysteria to shoulder shrugs. From my perspective, the need to summon the app in advance is definitely a drawback (and likely means that the announcement is not the game changer that many initially thought it might be). The scary factor here is the fact that ChatGPT will choose between the competing apps in the absence of a specific summons. How does ChatGPT choose between the competing apps? Will ChatGPT eventually monetize this choice (e.g., whomever pays ChatGPT the most)? Are the two (soon to be three) apps the only sources of content to respond to users’ prompts? Our friends at Seattle’s own Geekwire offer an interesting perspective on the announcement and the potentially perilous position that Expedia now finds itself.

• • Perplexity Launches Comet with Expedia. Also last week, AI platform Perplexity (as I’ve noted, one of the most interesting AI platforms for the travel industry) announced the launch of a new AI browser and AI assistant, Comet. Expedia Group joined the launch as one of the browser’s initial launch partners and is offering a first-of-its-kind incentive (Silver status on Expedia’s One Key loyalty program) to travelers to download the new browser. Users of the new browser and assistant will also be able to search, select and book travel without leaving the Perplexity platform (which is consistent with Perplexity’s earlier announced partnerships with TripAdvisor and Selfbook).

• • Questioning Airbnb’s Sincere Interest in Hotels? Recently posted job openings suggest that you might want to think otherwise. For those of you have been part of my recent AI and distribution presentations, Airbnb is one of the platforms I’m watching most closely in the months ahead. 

Have a great week everyone.