Imagine having a tireless travel assistant who already knows your plans, watches over every detail, and quietly fixes problems before you even notice. That’s the promise of Vayo, a new Seattle startup launched by Booking Holdings, the parent company behind Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable. Led by serial entrepreneur Mike Fridgen, Vayo is betting that specialized AI agents built specifically for travel can do a much better job than general-purpose assistants from the likes of OpenAI and Meta. Booking Holdings plans to invest $100 million in the venture, depending on Vayo’s progress and market conditions, and the company opened a waitlist for a free private beta on Wednesday. Vayo’s pitch is simple: a personal travel agent “built for trips, not tasks.” Instead of asking a chatbot to plan a vacation from scratch, users connect their email, and Vayo’s AI agents extract flight, hotel, and restaurant confirmations to create a living, organized itinerary. Then the system monitors those bookings for price drops, openings at sold-out hotels, and other changes that could affect a trip. If a flight is delayed, Vayo flags what that means for a hotel check-in or a dinner reservation. It also recommends restaurants and activities based on past trips and preferences. For now, users can make restaurant reservations through Vayo, with flight and hotel booking expected in the next few weeks. This is part of Booking Holdings’ broader effort to adapt to the rise of AI agents, which big tech companies and startups are developing to plan trips and make bookings directly, potentially bypassing traditional online travel sites. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel described travel as one of the most complex consumer experiences, with too much of the work still falling on travelers to manage. Vayo wants to change that, promising neutrality on its website: “Our only agenda is yours. Vayo is part of Booking Holdings, but it works for you, not for any one site. If the better room is on the hotel’s own site, or the right stay is on another platform, that’s where Vayo will send you.”
Under the hood, Vayo is less like a single chatbot and more like a small army of specialized agents working together. At any given moment, multiple AI agents are operating on a user’s behalf, each handling a different job and using different models best suited for the task. Vayo’s CTO and co-founder, Allen Chen, says the company picks the best available models for each specific need, and while Vayo has built its own system on top of off-the-shelf AI models, Chen expects the startup will soon need custom models for some tasks. The company says it reads only travel confirmations, not the rest of a user’s inbox, which is important for privacy and trust. In a demo, Fridgen showed how Vayo assembled his upcoming trips—to Amsterdam, to Philadelphia to visit his son in college, and to Guatemala for the holidays—within about a minute of connecting his email. Vayo also looks for patterns in a user’s travel history. It noticed, for example, that Fridgen travels to Philadelphia every March during his son’s sports season, and after he climbed Mount Rainier with his daughter this summer, it suggested a mountaineering trip. When the fare dropped on one of his Alaska Airlines flights, Vayo automatically captured the difference as a credit and notified him. For hotels, it currently prompts users to rebook at the lower rate. During the demo, Fridgen also reserved a restaurant table through OpenTable without ever leaving Vayo. The startup is initially targeting frequent leisure travelers who often plan trips for family and friends, coordinating details in Google Docs, Notion, or spreadsheets. That group makes up only about 5% of travelers but accounts for roughly 30% of travel spending, making them an attractive audience. Vayo connects directly with Booking Holdings brands including Booking.com, Kayak, and OpenTable, and it has signed a partnership with ticketing platform SeatGeek. Because it pulls confirmations from a user’s email, it can also track bookings made anywhere else, including directly with airlines and hotels, making it a truly comprehensive travel hub.
Vayo is led by people with deep roots in both travel and technology. Mike Fridgen, the CEO and co-founder, was on the founding team of Expedia’s vacation-package business, co-founded the travel startup TripHub, led Alaska Airlines’ digital business, and was founding head of product at Farecast, the airfare-prediction startup acquired by Microsoft, after which he led Bing’s travel and shopping search businesses. He also previously led Madrona Venture Labs, a Seattle startup studio, and was CEO of Decide.com, a price-prediction startup acquired by eBay. CTO Allen Chen brings a different but complementary background: he was previously CTO of Fanatics Collectibles and before that a partner in Boston Consulting Group’s AI practice. A serial entrepreneur himself, Chen co-founded two Seattle software startups, CloudPress and DataBlade, which were acquired by News Corp. and BCG, respectively. The startup’s head of growth is Ian Fliflet, former chief growth officer at OfferUp, the mobile marketplace for buying and selling used goods locally. Fridgen said Fliflet helped build OfferUp’s growth from the start and was at the top of his list for the role. Vayo has about 20 employees, all working in person in downtown Seattle, and the team has been building the product for about six months. The company’s name is pronounced VAY-oh, as in “vacation.” For Booking Holdings, the new venture also marks a return to Seattle, the home of its biggest rival, Expedia Group. Booking.com opened a Seattle office in 2012 and moved it to Bellevue the following year, with plans for as many as 350 jobs, but it closed the Bellevue office in 2020 amid the pandemic. Now Vayo is bringing the company back to the region with a much smaller, nimbler team.
Given the team’s entrepreneurial experience, a natural question is why build inside a travel giant instead of raising venture capital for an independent startup. Fridgen says the arrangement gives Vayo access to Booking Holdings’ travel inventory, infrastructure, and capital, while still allowing the team to operate like a startup. He described the category as “very crowded, very noisy” with a lot of competitors, and said Vayo has a unique opportunity to succeed with the backing of the world’s largest online travel company. Fridgen was already working on a consumer travel idea when his plans lined up with Booking Holdings’ interest in investing in new ventures. “It was really a meeting of the minds,” he said. In a footnote to its news release, Booking Holdings said the $100 million investment would be “subject to continued advancement of the product and market conditions.” Fridgen added that Vayo’s team will share in the value it creates, though he declined to give details on the ownership structure. Booking Holdings is also backing Lola, a separate AI startup from Kayak co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English, which launched last month. Fridgen described this as a “portfolio approach,” with Lola focused on everyday experiences, such as things to do on a weekend at home, while Vayo is “mile-deep in travel scenarios.” Fogel, the Booking Holdings CEO, said in a statement that he is confident in the Vayo team “and their ability to move with purpose, capitalize on early learnings and adapt at pace as they explore what the next generation of personalization in travel can look like.” The setup gives Vayo the best of both worlds: the resources and reach of a corporate giant, with the speed and focus of a startup.
Vayo is entering a crowded field of AI travel apps, including trip planners from both startups and established online travel sites. But Fridgen says he sees general-purpose personal AI agents—such as Meta’s Muse and fast-growing San Francisco startup Instinct—as Vayo’s main competitors. A growing number of these agents have run into resistance from the websites they try to use. Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse from its store last month, and Resy locked out a user whose Instinct agent repeatedly pinged the site for a table. Vayo is taking a different approach, relying on APIs and direct partnerships with travel companies rather than scraping websites. Fridgen says those direct relationships make the service more reliable for customers and avoid the risk of being blocked. Vayo wants to work with companies across the industry, not just Booking Holdings brands. It doesn’t have a direct relationship with Expedia, but Fridgen said he is open to one. “The only way this can live up to its promise as an orchestrator of your travel life that you’ll trust is if it has all the options,” he said, “and that’s what we’re going for.” Behind the scenes, Vayo runs numerous AI agents simultaneously, using different models for different jobs, and the company has built its own orchestration system on top of off-the-shelf models. This allows it to handle complex tasks like rebooking a flight, monitoring a sold-out hotel for an opening, and making a dinner reservation all at the same time. The emphasis on partnerships rather than workarounds is a deliberate strategy to build trust with both users and the travel industry, positioning Vayo as a neutral but deeply connected player in the ecosystem.
Vayo is free during the private beta, and the company hasn’t settled on a business model yet. Fridgen said a subscription is one possibility as the startup learns which features people are willing to pay for. Fliflet noted that travel also offers traditional revenue from commissions on bookings, so there are multiple paths to monetization. In the coming weeks, users will be able to book flights and hotels directly in Vayo, followed by features for planning trips with travel companions and a native mobile app. For now, the waitlist is open, and the team is focused on proving that a dedicated travel agent can earn a place in people’s lives. The ambition is bold: “We are out to build the leading consumer experience in travel—nothing less,” Fridgen said. With 20 employees in downtown Seattle, the backing of Booking Holdings, and a leadership team with deep experience in travel, e-commerce, and AI, Vayo is an experiment in whether a specialized agent can beat general-purpose assistants at their own game. It may succeed by being both deeply integrated and genuinely neutral, offering users the reassurance that it works for them, not for any single booking site. As AI continues to reshape the travel industry, Vayo’s approach—combining specialized agents, direct partnerships, and a human-centered design—could become a model for how consumers manage their increasingly complex lives. The real test will be whether travelers trust an AI with their inbox, their plans, and their personal preferences. If Vayo can reduce the stress of trip planning and surprise people with genuinely helpful support, it might just become the travel companion that Booking Holdings hopes for. For now, the future of travel planning may not be a generic chatbot, but a dedicated agent that knows you, your trips, and the little things that make travel less stressful and more enjoyable.
