Klook Launches K.ai for merchants’ back-office tasks
Experiences platform Klook has launched K.ai, an AI agent that lets merchants manage inventory, bookings, and pricing in Klook’s merchant portal by giving instructions, rather than only answering questions. For example, a merchant can request a report on last week’s bookings and then tell K.ai to raise weekend prices by 10%, and the change is applied directly. The tool is being rolled out to merchants globally in phases ahead of the year-end travel season. Klook says it targets the largely offline experiences sector, where only about 34% of bookings are made online (versus 66% for accommodations and 81% for flights, per Euromonitor) and small and medium-sized operators make up roughly 95% of the market.
Early results cited by Klook show individual inventory and pricing updates completed 95% faster and batch checks of products, inventory, and orders 97% faster, while merchants using K.ai recorded 3.4 times as many monthly bookings as those who don’t. K.ai also offers one-click product listing, which generates pre-filled listings from merchants’ existing materials, and analyzes reviews and dashboard data to flag performance changes, possible causes, and improvement opportunities.
Hyatt rolls out enhanced Hyatt Leverage powered by Spotnana
Hyatt Hotels Corporation announced an enhanced version of Hyatt Leverage, its all-in-one online business travel platform for eligible small-and-midsize businesses, aimed at reducing friction in corporate travel booking. The redesigned platform offers exclusive rates at more than 1,300 Hyatt hotels across the company’s five brand portfolios and lets clients book, view, and manage reservations, travel spend, and payments in one place.
The platform is now powered by Spotnana, a Travel-as-a-Service platform that enables an integrated booking experience, and select existing clients have already been migrated to it. Hyatt executive Alice Harrington-Caravello said the update responds to travellers’ demand for personalisation, collaboration, and seamless experiences, while clients from Brixmor Property Group and Quantbot Technologies praised the platform’s discounted rates, global reach, and ease of travel management.
Travelsoft Pay Now integrated into six Travelsoft platforms
Travelsoft Pay, the payment technology company of Travelsoft, announced that it is now integrated into six of the group’s travel technology platforms – Tigerbay (UK), Orchestra (France), Afidium (France, an Orchestra subsidiary since July 2026), Travel Compositor (Spain and Latin America), Travel Connection Technology (Romania), and Travelgate (Spain).
Travel agencies, tour operators, and other travel businesses using these platforms can activate Travelsoft Pay without running a separate integration project. Depending on the platform, clients can use Pay-In, Pay-Out, or both. Pay-In offers a single integration to multiple payment providers and methods for consumer and business payments, with routing configured to each client’s preferences and provider agreements and global coverage. Pay-Out provides virtual Mastercard cards for paying suppliers, currently available to businesses in Europe and the UK, with wider reach planned. The announcement follows Travelsoft Pay’s presentation of its offer at VivaTech in Paris in June 2026. Managing Director Mary Cotugno said the aim is for payments to come built into the platform a travel business already uses, giving businesses of any size the same enterprise-grade tools.
Pet Jet Travel launches one-stop online booking for air travel with pets
Barcelona-based travel agency and travel technology company Pet Jet Travel (PJT) announced the launch of a flight booking platform following its accreditation by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which supports direct airline ticketing and NDC (New Distribution Capability) connectivity.
The platform combines flight distribution with specialist services for passengers traveling with pets, so that the traveler and pet are checked and booked together rather than requiring owners to contact airlines separately. It handles three booking types – dogs and cats in the cabin (PETC), larger pets in the hold (AVIH), and assistance dogs (SVAN). In-cabin pets are booked through airline booking channels, while hold and assistance-dog bookings are requested from the airline and confirmed by it before travel. The platform uses live pet-space availability where airlines share it and requests space directly from the airline where they don’t. A central feature is agentic AI that cross-checks pet documentation, weight, crate dimensions, and route-specific requirements before submission, to reduce rejected bookings, delays, and airport complications. The platform also checks route-specific documents such as microchip, rabies vaccination, pet passport or health certificate, and blood tests, though final acceptance rests with the airline at check-in and with authorities at the destination. PJT has completed a full pet booking test from search to check-in in its test environment and plans to add more pet-friendly airlines as they open pet services to agencies through NDC.
Expedia Group tests OpenAI ad products
On Expedia Group’s Q3 2026 earnings call, CEO Ariane Gorin said the company is participating in OpenAI’s advertising products and is willing to accept returns lower than those of more established, optimised channels while it tests them. She did not specify which products Expedia is using; OpenAI’s recent launches include “Sponsored Agents,” introduced in September, which lets users start a conversation with a business-sponsored AI agent after clicking an ad.
Gorin said she expects many new AI services to become big channels over time and that more fragmentation at the top of the funnel benefits Expedia. Expedia’s own advertising growth slowed to 7% in Q3 from 13% in Q2, which CFO Derek Andersen attributed to ongoing product improvements such as campaign management and AI-enabled tools. Gorin said Expedia is using integrations to learn how agents make decisions and who uses them, and that its integration with Meta’s Muse, announced in late September, went live on the day of the call. She said the economics of these partnerships are still “being worked out,” that agentic traffic is high intent but a small share of the total and not affecting direct bookings, and that it is either incremental or taken from other paid channels. Citing third-party data, she said Expedia leads in citation share in the U.S. and that agentic AI is strongest in discovery, while consumers still prefer to book with trusted brands. On the B2B side, Gorin said agentic opportunities include helping existing partners with technology and serving AI companies that decide to sell travel themselves; Qantas became the first partner to use Expedia’s agentic template in September. Q3 revenue rose 12% year over year to $4.9 billion, driven by B2B revenue of $1.7 billion (up 23%), while net income rose 7% to just over $1 billion and adjusted EBITDA rose 17% to $1.69 billion. Direct selling and marketing spend rose 10% to $2.18 billion, booked room nights rose 7% to 115.7 million, and gross bookings rose 11% to $34 billion, with B2B up 19% and B2C up 7%.
(via Phocuswire)
