Jason Cincotta on Agentic Commerce in Travel at Travel Tech Show London

Kismet CEO Jason Cincotta joined a panel at Travel Tech Show London to work through the question the whole industry is now asking: what does it actually mean to power agentic commerce in travel? The session, “Getting your travel business ready for agentic commerce,” set out to explore the fully AI-driven journey, where discovery, booking, and payment all happen inside a conversational interface, and what it takes for travel brands to build agent-ready products without giving up distribution and the customer relationship. Jason shared the stage with Harry Herbert of Anthropic and Andrew Jordan of Travelport, moderated by writer and author Mark Frary. He came at it from the angle Kismet cares about most: what the shift means for lodging suppliers.

Agentic commerce can’t mean one thing

The point Jason kept returning to is that planning a trip is part of the fun, and guests enjoy it. So agentic commerce can’t mean the same thing for a leisure traveler dreaming up a trip as it does for a corporate road warrior who just needs to get from A to B. The opportunity, he argued, isn’t to automate the joy out of travel. It’s to design new experiences around how people discover, plan, and book, built around what each kind of traveler actually wants.

This isn’t a someday capability

Where the panel agreed: some agents already have the credit card and the ability to buy. That is not a future scenario. It is here today. And the shift in consumer behavior, Jason noted, is going to move faster than most people expect.

What it means for lodging suppliers

For hotels and vacation rental managers, that raises a harder question than how to get bookings from AI. The way Jason frames it, as agents start booking on a guest’s behalf at scale, suppliers will need a whole new layer of infrastructure to serve them, and to manage, and frankly protect, rate integrity in the process. Selling to one person clicking through one website at a time is one thing. Serving thousands of agents shopping in parallel is completely different, and most operators are not set up for it yet.

His throughline was simple: if you don’t serve the human, you can’t serve the agent. The operators who win will be the ones who design for both.

Building the infrastructure that lets independent lodging brands win the direct booking, through AI or not, is exactly what Kismet does. If you’re a lodging supplier thinking about what agentic commerce means for your business, we’d love to compare notes. Start at kismet.travel.