To The Moon

Expedia, Booking, and Airbnb all tumbled together, beaten down by Muse.

$Expedia(EXPE)$  

$Booking Holdings(BKNG)$  

$Airbnb, Inc.(ABNB)$  

$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$  

Muse is a personal AI assistant that actually gets things done. You can tell it, "Book my flights and hotel for Tokyo next month," and it will browse the web, compare prices, fill out forms, and place the order all on its own.

How do these three companies make their money?

By getting you to open their app or website, search, compare, and complete your booking, so they can take a cut of the commission.

What the market fears is this: #The choice happens inside Muse.# The screen is no longer theirs, and the money follows.

Analysts have cited a widely quoted figure: if AI assistants capture 5% to 10% of the travel, ride-hailing, and food delivery markets, the combined revenue loss for these companies could exceed $5 billion. This isn't reflected in current earnings reports yet, but it's enough to spook investors into fleeing first.

However, headlines usually overstate the case.

Flights and hotels are actually two different systems.

Flights are in greater danger. Muse has already integrated directly with over 500 airlines via Duffel, bypassing Expedia or Booking entirely. But flights are low-margin anyway; what these three really make money on is accommodation.

Hotels haven't been broken through yet. Right now, when Muse books a room, it usually still opens a browser to surf Expedia or Hotels.com, searching, comparing, and checking out just like a human. Transactions often still land on the platform, but "who owns that decision-making screen" is starting to loosen. Another hidden concern is that assistants might constantly scrape websites without proportionally placing orders—leaving platforms to shoulder the traffic and customer service costs without necessarily earning the corresponding commissions.

Expedia is in an even more contradictory position.

It has already announced a partnership with Muse, allowing users to feed their itinerary to the assistant and have Expedia help arrange hotels. When the news broke, the stock bounced briefly, only to give up all those gains the next day. The market's message was ice-cold: at best, Expedia can act as a supplier in the short term; in the long run, it risks shifting from "users opening Expedia" to "Muse deciding who to use."

Expedia looks the most like a pure comparison platform. Chain hotels and flights are highly substitutable, making it the easiest to be bypassed by an assistant, which explains why its stock fell the most.

Booking has the highest quality, the largest scale, and the strongest bargaining power with hotels. It stands a better chance of turning Muse into just another distribution channel rather than being replaced by one.

Airbnb has the best moat. The same vacation rental usually cannot be booked on a hotel's official website, so an assistant can't simply replace it by "opening a browser to compare."

These three aren't going to vanish tomorrow, but their commissions, traffic, and customer acquisition costs may all be up for renegotiation. Whoever owns the screen where the choice happens matters more than whoever owns the most hotel photos.

Destruction hasn't happened yet. The revaluation, however, has already begun.