Hotels Now Face Three Competing Commission Models for AI Bookings. None of Them Are Regulated Yet.

The infrastructure for AI agents to book hotel rooms directly is now live, and nobody has settled who gets paid when it happens. Hospitality Net’s Alejandro Berdonces Corroto traces the timeline: OpenAI/Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol both launched in September 2025; Booking and Expedia shipped booking apps inside ChatGPT’s 800-million-user base that October, with both companies’ stock dropping 4-7% on the news; Google added agentic booking to AI Mode in November; ChatGPT introduced ads in February 2026, hitting Amadeus shares; and OpenAI removed Instant Checkout in March, pushing transactions out to third-party apps via the Agentic Commerce Protocol instead.

That last move is why the commission question is now unavoidable. Berdonces Corroto identifies three structural models hotels are being routed into simultaneously: OTA-in-chat, where Booking, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and Kayak operate inside AI assistants at their existing commission rates; MCP aggregators like DirectBooker, which introduce a new layer of intermediary fees on top; and proprietary MCP servers, where a hotel or its agency controls the connection directly. Brad Brewer of Agentic Hospitality is quoted warning that without regulation, independent hotels risk repeating the exact pattern that played out with search engines and OTAs — paying repeatedly for access to guests who are already looking for them by name.

IHG’s own move is a live example of the third path. IHG’s beta launch of AI conversational search — letting guests describe a trip in natural language and book with cash, points, or a blend, directly on IHG.com and its app — makes IHG the third major hotel group after Hilton’s AI Planner and Marriott’s Ask Bonvoy to invest in a proprietary conversational booking layer it controls rather than cede that interaction to an OTA-in-chat experience. CEO Elie Maalouf framed the launch as changing “how guests interact with IHG,” but the commission-economics reading is more concrete: it’s a chain-scale bet on the one model of the three that doesn’t require paying a new intermediary for the transaction.

Independent and small-group hotels don’t have IHG’s budget to build a proprietary conversational layer, which makes the unresolved commission question a direct P&L exposure rather than an abstract industry debate — the model a property ends up routed through by default may not be the one it would have chosen.