This insight summarises Trust, identity and payments: Preparing for agentic commerce in travel, partner content from PayPal published on PhocusWire on 8 October 2026.
From recommendations to bookings. Travel merchants know AI already shapes discovery, but most are not yet ready for the moment agents move from recommending trips to booking them. Consumers still make the key decisions: agents speed up research, surface relevant options and simplify complex planning, while people review, refine and approve purchases.
Why travel is harder. A single trip can involve multiple suppliers, changing prices, fluctuating availability, complex itineraries, ancillary purchases and different rules for cancellations, refunds and post-booking changes. Each of these has to survive the hand-off to an agent.
The trust gap. Travelers increasingly let AI handle low-risk tasks such as researching destinations and comparing fares, but they are less confident giving an agent their card and buying authority without safeguards. Judy Reeves, product leader for agentic commerce at PayPal, sums it up: "all roads lead to trust." Merchants must trust that transactions are verified and that they will be paid, consumers must trust that their money is protected, and platforms, travel providers and payment rails must trust each other enough to interoperate.
What the infrastructure looks like:
- A trusted identity layer that provides authentication, fraud detection and verification.
- Agent-aware payment tokens, such as Mastercard's Agentic Tokens and the Agentic Commerce Protocol's Shared Payment Tokens, which record the agent's identity in the transaction so disputes can be attributed correctly.
- Flexible commerce infrastructure ready for bookings that agents initiate.
Enterprise momentum. A PayPal-commissioned Agentic Commerce Pulse Report of 498 firms found that 94% of large enterprises expect agentic commerce to have a positive business impact, 86% believe failing to adopt it could cost them customers or revenue, and 52% have already integrated it into regular operations.
Why this matters for hotels. The building blocks for agentic booking are converging. Hotels that can verify who an agent is acting for, accept tokenized payments and apply their cancellation and change rules cleanly will be ready when agents start completing bookings, not just recommending them.