AI Travel Brief

Google's I/O event landed with a wall of announcements, but two moves stand out for travel: the Universal Cart and the quietly-released WebMCP. Together they sketch out Google's strategy for owning the agentic booking journey without becoming an OTA themselves and keeping their best advertisers happy.  - Google's Universal Cart: a persistent AI-powered shopping hub across Search, Gemini, YouTube,...

Airbnb shipped its most ambitious product release in years - boutique hotels, car rentals, grocery delivery, and AI features across the board. Now the question is whether their approach to AI distribution will look like genius or the most expensive strategic restraint in travel tech history. In this episode: - A summary of Airbnb's summer 2026 product release: boutique hotels, rental cars, grocery...

AI in Travel Search & Distribution, 2026   For the first time, more than half of US leisure travelers have used AI somewhere in their journey. And earlier this month, the industry got its first real test of a fully agentic booking. This is Episode 1 of the AITB Foundational Series — a five-part deep-dive mapping where AI and travel actually stand right now. In this episode, Boris Pavlov unpack...

Welcome to The AI Travel Brief. The AI news shaping travel, explained.  If you work in travel and you've felt that creeping sense that everyone else has figured out AI before you have, this show is for you. In this short introductory episode, Boris Pavlov — former operator and current CEO of OnSeason — lays out why he's launching AITB, what to expect, and why "we are late" is the wrong way to thin...