What happens when AI agents stop just planning travel and start actually booking it?

<p>In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I catch up with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-gauthier-7b663b87/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">Kevin Gautier</a>, CEO and founder of Jinko — almost exactly one year after we first spoke about what he was building.<br>Kevin is a four-time travel founder whose journey has taken him from video travel reviews and NDC aggregation to a Gen Z flight app that reached #2 in the French App Store, a stint helping build Hopper in Europe, and now Jinko.<br>And Jinko has evolved significantly.<br>Originally conceived as a consumer travel app inside ChatGPT, Jinko has pivoted to something potentially much bigger: the travel infrastructure layer for AI agents.<br>We dig into:<br>🤖 Why AI agents will need their own travel infrastructure — just as websites and apps needed APIs before them<br>✈️ How an AI assistant could search and book flights, hotels, trains, experiences and rental cars without becoming a travel company itself<br>🔌 Why Jinko is protocol-agnostic, supporting MCP, MCP Apps, APIs and CLI integrations<br>🛒 How agentic travel could shift us from booking individual components to handing an agent an entire trip to fulfil<br>🎯 Why traveller intent may become one of the most valuable pieces of the travel booking puzzle<br>🏨 Whether AI could finally give individual hotels and experience operators a better chance of competing directly with OTAs<br>🤝 The potential for agent-to-agent negotiation — where hotels could compete using breakfast, upgrades, dining credits and other benefits rather than simply price<br>💳 Why agentic payments remain one of the biggest hurdles — particularly when travellers are being asked to trust an AI agent with a $3,000+ transaction<br>⚙️ Why API connectivity remains critical even in an AI world<br>💰 How Jinko makes money through API calls, revenue share and transaction fees<br>🌍 And why Kevin expects travel distribution to explode into entirely new places as more non-travel companies begin embedding travel into their products.<br>One of Kevin&#39;s most interesting observations comes from the actual prompts Jinko sees: people aren&#39;t naturally asking AI to buy an isolated hotel or flight. They&#39;re asking it to plan the trip.<br>That seemingly small difference could have enormous consequences for OTAs, suppliers and the entire structure of travel distribution.<br>We also get into the question I find particularly fascinating: Who wins when your AI agent becomes the travel buyer?<br>#AI #TravelAI #AgenticAI #TravelTech #AIAgents #MCP #TravelDistribution #AgenticCommerce #TravelStartups #Jinko</p>