NEW YORK, March 5, 2026, 14:12 (EST)
- Expedia shares jumped roughly 11% following a report that OpenAI is pulling back on plans for direct checkout within ChatGPT.
- Booking Holdings gained ground after investors took a fresh look at whether AI really poses a threat to online travel agencies.
- Expedia executives have been telling investors they’re doubling down on AI, sticking to strict cost controls along the way
Expedia Group surged roughly 11% Thursday, following word that OpenAI is scaling back its direct checkout ambitions for ChatGPT—cooling concerns that chatbots might draw away travel bookings. Booking Holdings also popped, up around 8%. Tripadvisor advanced close to 3%.
It’s significant right now: online travel agencies pour money into grabbing customer clicks and driving bookings on their own platforms. There’s been investor concern that “disintermediation”—that is, travelers bypassing the middleman—might erode companies like Expedia’s grip on both the sale and their ability to set prices.
OpenAI noticed users were turning to ChatGPT to look up products but weren’t actually buying anything, The Information reported. Now, the company looks set to steer transactions toward third-party apps linked to ChatGPT. One source put it bluntly: out of millions of Shopify merchants, just about a dozen have managed to integrate so far, as technical issues stack up.
Bernstein’s Richard Clarke described the move as “incrementally positive” for online travel agencies. “This means that Booking and Expedia can continue to get in front of consumers on AI-platforms, lowering the risk of disintermediation,” Clarke wrote. OpenAI, for its part, did not reply to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters
Expedia and Booking jumped on ChatGPT’s plugins program early in 2023, tapping it mainly for trip planning and research tasks, not payments. That retreat for now points to the chatbot’s role at the top of the funnel: good for sparking interest, but it hasn’t yet shown it can seal the transaction.
Expedia’s fourth-quarter numbers, released Feb. 12, showed an 11% gain in gross bookings to $27.0 billion, alongside an 11% rise in revenue, hitting $3.55 billion. CEO Ariane Gorin told investors she “expect[s] our positive momentum to continue in 2026.” For that year, Expedia is projecting revenue between $15.6 billion and $16.0 billion. Expedia Group
Expedia will lock in shareholders of record this Thursday for its upcoming $0.48 per-share quarterly dividend, set to be paid out March 26, according to a recent filing.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference on March 3, CFO Scott Schenkel told investors Expedia intends to “cut the cost” and “test[ ] the efficient frontier”—his way of saying they’ll only spend where the payoff makes sense. Some of those saved dollars, he said, are getting funneled right back into machine learning and AI projects. Investing.com
Expedia’s surge, along with gains for other travel sites, underscores just how much online travel is now about distribution bets. Should AI platforms turn into the main entry for travel shoppers, a new fight emerges: who controls that final click, and who pockets the fee.
But this relief rally has an expiration date. Should OpenAI, Google, or any other AI platform successfully roll out in-chat checkout at scale, online travel agencies still stand to lose their direct line to customers—and the valuable data that goes with it—even if bookings end up in a “partner” app.
Expedia faces a key question: will AI turn into just another storefront delivering paying customers, or morph into a gatekeeper angling for a heftier slice? Thursday’s swing in the shares highlights just how touchy the market is on this point.
