This insight summarizes Skift's June 2026 interview with Skyscanner CEO Bryan Batista, now a year into the role after eight years at Booking.com and three at Tesla. Skyscanner is owned by China's Trip.com Group and remains one of the largest global flight metasearch surfaces — which makes how it thinks about agentic booking a leading indicator for travel distribution broadly.
Reopening the assisted-booking question, this time with agents. Metasearch players (Google, Kayak, Skyscanner) all tried to process bookings on their own surfaces on behalf of advertisers in the last decade. None of it stuck — Skyscanner reverted to pure price comparison in the early 2020s. Batista's bet is that AI agents change the math: instead of redirecting users to an airline or OTA partner page mid-funnel, an agent can complete the booking with the partner while keeping the user in Skyscanner's surface. The motivation is real friction reduction, not commission capture.
Personal agents enter the picture. Batista expects user-side agents to participate in metasearch — your assistant talking to Skyscanner's assistant talking to the airline's assistant. That is a structural change in how demand is expressed and matched, not a UI tweak. The metasearch layer's job shifts from rendering options to negotiating with other agents on the user's behalf.
B2B and the U.S. Skyscanner expanded into B2B via acquisition and is preparing a bigger U.S. push — a notable move given the U.S. market is the deepest spend pool and the one most exposed to agentic search disruption from Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity.
Why hospitality should care. Flight metasearch is the canary. If agentic handoffs work for flights — where SKUs are commoditized and pricing is transparent — hotels are next, but with messier inventory and richer differentiation. Operators should be asking now: is our content, rate parity, and API access ready for an agent-to-agent booking flow where the human never sees a brand site?