Booking Holdings launches Vayo: AI travel agent that monitors your bookings from your inbox

Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, has launched a new initiative: Vayo, an AI travel agent focused on efficiently managing travel bookings. Vayo collects and centralizes loose booking confirmations from the user's inbox, such as flights, hotel reservations, and restaurant bookings. The assistant remains active even after bookings, tracking changes and price drops to help travelers optimize their travel experience.

On October 14, 2026, Vayo was officially presented. The company is headquartered in Seattle and is led by co-founder Mike Fridgen. Currently, the service is in a phase of free closed testing, for which interested parties can sign up via a waitlist. Vayo is designed to alleviate the planning pressure on travelers by aggregating various bookings into a single overview.

Booking Holdings plans to invest up to $100 million (approximately €89 million) in Vayo, depending on product development and market conditions. Fridgen emphasizes that the initiative goes beyond simple chatbots and aims to address the complexity of travel, particularly in coordinating diverse bookings. Vayo can connect to accounts with different providers, not only within the Booking Holdings ecosystem but also with competitors.

Privacy is an important concern for the new service. Vayo claims to only analyze travel-related emails, while the rest of the inbox remains private. The assistant has read-only access to Gmail and does not store complete emails after extracting travel details. However, Vayo is currently only available for U.S. users, and it is unclear if and when the service will be introduced in Europe. With this step, Booking Holdings aims to anticipate the growing role of AI in the travel industry.

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