This insight summarises Return on tokens: Who pays for the free travel agent?, by Eugenia Dunaeva, an independent director at TravelAI and a VC and angel investor, published on PhocusWire on 20 October 2026.
The number nobody tracks. Travel executives can quote their look-to-book ratio from memory, but few measure tokens per booking. That gap matters as personal agents scale. Instinct raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation in September, Hark and Tab launched booking agents a week later, and Booking Holdings launched Vayo on 14 October. Instinct and Meta's Muse are free to travelers, so someone else pays to run them.
Return on tokens (ROT). Borrowed from Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner of Not Boring, ROT is the value an agent produces minus its token cost, divided by that cost. Flat-rate AI pricing is over: large providers moved business customers to usage-based pricing in spring 2026.
Two ledgers.
- Agent economics: in Dunaeva's example, 1,000 requests produce 100 bookings worth $30 each, or $3,000. At 60 cents a request, the token bill is $600, because every request is paid for, not only the ones that book. Payment, distribution and support costs still come out of the rest.
- Supplier economics: agents check prices without tiring, multiplying search traffic, and can hold several rooms on free cancellation and release the extras later.
Who pays. For now, investors. Instinct founder Noah Shinn has floated commissions, reportedly up to 30% per booking from boutique hotels, which Dunaeva warns would weaken the agent's neutrality.
What boards should track:
- Cost per completed trip, including failed attempts, not cost per token.
- Which steps need a model and which can run as plain code. "Agents should do the thinking; code should do the doing."
- Margin sensitivity to usage growth and vendor price changes.
- How much search traffic now comes from machines, and whether to charge for it.
Why this matters for hotels. No hotel group has joined Sierra and Meta's new Personal Agent Protocol, while United Airlines and Hertz are design partners. Distribution costs in travel rarely stay unpaid for long, so hotels should understand agent economics now. As Dunaeva puts it, agents will teach travel the look-to-book lesson again, "this time with an invoice for every look."