Meta’s Muse uses Expedia to help users search and book travel
Meta's AI assistant is already reshaping how millions of people search for flights and hotels, and Expedia is along for the ride, whether it planned to be or not.
Meta’s personal AI assistant Muse is two weeks old and already rewriting the rules for online travel. The app, which launched on September 8 in the US, has racked up more than 2.5 million downloads and climbed to the top of app store charts. Its travel features lean heavily on Expedia’s infrastructure, but the relationship between the two companies is more complicated than a simple handshake deal.
Muse handles flight bookings through a direct API integration with Duffel, giving it access to live inventory from over 500 airlines. For hotels and car rentals, though, the assistant takes a different route: it uses browser automation to navigate consumer-facing sites like Expedia and Hotels.com on behalf of the user.
The partnership that isn’t quite a partnership
The word “partnership” deserves an asterisk here. Meta and Expedia Group did expand their collaboration back in May 2026, but that deal focused on AI-driven conversational experiences within Meta’s ad feeds and trip planning tools. It was primarily about social advertising, not about Muse browsing Expedia’s website like a power user.
No formal “Muse-Expedia partnership” was announced when the assistant launched. The hotel and car rental booking flow works through browser navigation rather than a dedicated API, which means Muse is essentially acting as an automated customer on Expedia’s platform.
That distinction matters. API-level partnerships give both sides control over pricing, inventory, and the user experience. Browser automation, by contrast, means Muse is interpreting web pages in real time, which can break when designs change and offers less visibility into conversion data for the travel provider.
How Muse actually works
Muse is available on iOS, Android, WhatsApp, and through its web interface at muse.ai. The assistant is designed to handle a range of tasks beyond travel, but the booking features have been its headline act.
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For flights, the Duffel API integration is the clean version of what AI-assisted commerce could look like. Users describe what they want in natural language, Muse queries live availability, and the booking happens within the app.
Hotels and rental cars follow a messier but still functional path. Muse opens a sandboxed browser session, navigates to Expedia or Hotels.com, searches based on the user’s preferences, and presents options back in the chat interface. The user confirms, and Muse completes the transaction.
Privacy is handled through some genuinely interesting engineering. Muse runs tasks in isolated virtual machines, meaning the browsing sessions used for hotel searches are walled off from other data. Payments use one-time-use cards, so the user’s actual financial information never touches the merchant’s system.
The pricing structure offers three tiers. A free version provides basic functionality. A $20 per month subscription unlocks more capable features. And a $100 per month premium tier sits at the top.
Why travel is the proving ground
Meta’s reach gives Muse an extraordinary distribution advantage. The company’s platforms serve approximately 3.6 billion daily active users as of the second quarter of 2026. Even if a small fraction of that user base adopts Muse for travel, the volume of bookings flowing through the system could be significant enough to reshape how online travel agencies think about their business.
That’s the tension Expedia and its competitors now face. Muse is sending customers to their platforms, which is good. But those customers are arriving through an AI intermediary that controls the presentation layer, which means the OTA loses influence over which properties get highlighted, how prices are framed, and what ancillary products get surfaced. The brand relationship shifts from Expedia-to-consumer to Expedia-to-Meta-to-consumer.
What the travel industry should be watching
For Expedia specifically, the strategic question is whether to formalize the relationship with a proper API integration or try to limit automated access to its platform. The first option gives Expedia more control and potentially better conversion data. The second option risks pushing Meta toward competitors like Booking Holdings or direct hotel inventory providers.