The short version
In the space of three weeks, three AI agents that book travel on a traveller's behalf went live. Meta launched Muse on 8 September. OpenAI launched Dots inside ChatGPT on 29 September. Instinct, a standalone agent you text, says more than half of its transactions are travel.
Flights and hotels already have a dedicated route into these agents. Duffel plugged airline inventory into Muse on launch day, and Expedia announced hotel booking inside Muse two weeks later. Tours and activities have no equivalent integration in any of the three. So when a traveller asks one of these agents to book a food tour or a boat trip, the agent goes to the open web and decides for itself where to look, what to compare and which site gets the booking.
For tour and activity suppliers, that is the whole story. The agent is now the customer, and none of the three publishes how it chooses.
What are Muse, Dots and Instinct?
They are personal AI agents. Unlike a chatbot, which tells you how to book something, an agent goes and books it.
| Muse | Dots | Instinct | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built by | Meta | OpenAI | Instinct (independent startup) |
| Launched | 8 Sept 2026 (Meta) | 29 Sept 2026 (CNBC) | Invite-only; $1bn Series C at a $10bn valuation reported 28 Sept (Skift) |
| Where you use it | iOS, Android and muse.ai, US first (Meta) | Inside ChatGPT, Slack and Teams, for Pro and Business Premium users in eligible markets (CNBC) | Text message or phone call (TechCrunch) |
| How it reaches businesses | Connectors, plus its own browser running on a dedicated virtual machine (Meta) | Its own cloud computer, connecting to more than 4,000 apps (CNBC) | Says it is trained to use a phone and computer the way a person does; browsing method not disclosed (Messaging Agents) |
| Travel integrations named | Duffel for flights; Expedia for hotels, "coming soon" (Skift, Expedia) | None named | None named |
| Scale signal | 2.5 million North American downloads in 13 days (UncoverAlpha) | One Dot per user to start (Axios) | Approaching $1bn in annual transactions, more than 50% travel (TechCrunch) |
| Tours and activities integration | None | None | None |
The last row is the one that matters.
How does an agent book a tour today?
Skift tested Muse the day after launch. Flights ran through the direct Duffel connection, with live inventory across more than 500 airlines. Hotels did not. For those, Muse "simply opens a browser and shops consumer sites like Expedia and Hotels.com the way a human would, choosing where to search, what to compare, and which site gets the booking" (Skift).
That is how tours and activities are booked by all three agents right now, because no activities integration exists. The agent searches, opens pages, reads them, and books on whichever site it can make sense of and complete a checkout on.
Two consequences follow.
First, your page is the integration. If an agent can read your price, availability, duration, meeting point and cancellation terms from your own site, and complete payment there, it can book you directly. If it cannot, it books the same tour somewhere it can, which today usually means a marketplace.
Second, the default favours whoever is easiest to read. Large marketplaces have clean, consistent product pages and checkouts built for strangers. A supplier site with prices inside an image, availability behind a widget that only loads on click, or a checkout that forces account creation is hard for an agent to complete. The agent will not complain. It will just go elsewhere. And when two pages are equally readable, the agent has little to separate them beyond reliability signals such as reviews, cancellations and response speed, which is the case for a Trust Score.
Why did travel stocks fall when Muse launched?
Because investors read the same thing. On 23 September, the day after Expedia announced it was joining Muse, Expedia shares were down 7%, Airbnb 6% and Booking Holdings 5% in morning trading, while Meta rose 2% (Yahoo Finance). The argument: an agent that can search, compare and book directly with the supplier removes the reason to pass through an aggregator, and "the commission goes with it". For a supplier, that commission is typically 20–30% of every booking, as we set out in what you actually keep on Viator, GetYourGuide and Klook.
That only holds if the supplier is bookable by the agent. Expedia moved inside Muse within weeks. It remains merchant of record for those hotel bookings (Expedia). The marketplaces are not waiting to be bypassed. They are becoming the agent's preferred supplier.
So the disruption cuts both ways. Agents can route around the marketplaces, or straight into them. Which one happens for your products depends on what the agent finds when it arrives.
Can a tour and activity supplier get into these agents directly?
Partly, and with caveats.
Muse has a public connector platform. Businesses describe their product, submit it for functional, security and legal review, and complete end-to-end testing; editors then review connectors for featured placement (Muse Connector Platform). It received more than 2,000 submissions in its first few days (Stacktree). Meta's public documentation does not state pricing, revenue share or review times, and promotion is based on usage and editorial discretion. A connector is a door, not a ranking.
Dots reaches businesses through apps connected to ChatGPT. OpenAI has not published how Dots chooses between them for a travel task.
Instinct has started curating instead. Its new Instinct Selections feature mixes AI suggestions with human-curated picks across dining, travel and shopping, and the founder has spoken of partnering with local travel guides (TechCrunch). Instinct has not said how those picks are chosen or whether it will make money from them.
The honest position: none of the three agents publishes how it decides which supplier to recommend or book. Anyone selling a guaranteed ranking in Muse, Dots or Instinct is guessing. What can be controlled is whether an agent can understand and book you once it arrives, and you can test that today using the method in our guide to auditing what AI assistants say about your tours.
Where Tixxly fits
Tixxly is AI infrastructure for tour and activity suppliers, not an OTA, and charges zero commission.
Every Tixxly storefront publishes machine-readable files that tell an arriving agent what it can do: read a product, check live availability for a date and party size, and register an intent to book that hands the traveller a confirmation link (Tixxly agent documentation). Product pages carry structured data an agent can read without running a widget. Checkout is embedded through Stripe Connect, and the supplier remains merchant of record.
The agents will keep changing. The test does not: when one arrives on your page, can it understand you and book you? That is what we build for.
Connect once. Reach everywhere.