The news. On Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said travel is one of the "top use cases" for Muse, the company's AI agent. He also said he is working out how to make money from it early, possibly by taking "a percent of the value that we are helping to create for people," Skift reports.
Muse is a month old. It runs inside Meta's messaging app, with glasses planned. Meta told investors more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set it up in about six weeks. On the supply side, a flights API and a hotel-rates platform are connected, with hotel bookings finished on the hotels' own booking engines and a U.S. rollout planned.
The booking moves to where people already talk
People already find destinations on Instagram and argue about trips in group chats. Meta now wants the last step, the payment, to happen in the same place. Skift is careful to say the travel economics are unproven. But the direction is clear: the booking is moving into the conversation.
Agencies have been here for years
This is less strange for a travel agency than it sounds. In our part of the world, a large share of travel was always sold in a chat. More than 44,700 travellers passed through the desks I ran, and their trips were arranged in quotes, changes, names, room types and "is it still available," typed between people.
What Meta is building is a machine version of that desk. It will answer the easy questions well. The hard part is the same as always: the client who changes the dates twice, the room that is not what the photo showed, the refund nobody wants to own.
If the sale moves into the chat, the agency that already runs its business in chats is not behind. It has a head start, as long as it knows what its own conversations contain.
What share of your bookings start with a message, not a form?
Source: Skift — Meta Calls Travel 'a Top Use Case' for Muse.