--- title: OpenAI Buys AI Travel Agent Odessia Days After Uber Counted Four Rides Booked by AI Agents description: OpenAI has bought Odessia, the AI travel agent founded by Sonder's Francis Davidson, days after Uber said AI agents booked four of its rides in a week. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-10T22:05:58.731Z updated: 2026-11-10T22:05:58.752Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/openai-buys-ai-travel-agent-odessia image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/odessia-openai-announcement-card.webp categories: Artificial Intelligence content_type: News region: San Francisco publication: Sovereign Magazine about: - type: Organization name: OpenAI description: American artificial intelligence company, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot and the GPT family of models. - type: Organization name: Odessia description: Odessia was an AI travel agent that planned and booked a trip in one conversation. Founded by Francis Davidson and backed by Sequoia Capital, it was acquired by OpenAI in November 2026. url: https://odessia.com industry: Travel technology sameAs: - https://x.com/OdessiaTravel --- OpenAI has bought Odessia, a startup whose AI travel agent plans and books a whole trip in one conversation, founder Francis Davidson [said on Tuesday](https://x.com/FDavidsonT/status/2120214953349263473), six days after Uber told investors that AI agents had booked four of its rides in Halloween week. Davidson said he is joining OpenAI "to focus on the future of travel". OpenAI has not announced the deal and did not confirm it when TechCrunch asked, and no price has been disclosed. Odessia's website now shows a notice headed "OpenAI has acquired Odessia", which says the service is no longer available and gives an email address for customers who need to change existing bookings. Davidson founded Odessia in San Francisco less than a year ago, after stepping down as chief executive of Sonder, the short-term rental company he co-founded. Odessia raised about $6 million from investors led by Sequoia Capital, launched in June with a team of eight and opened to the public on October 14 as a free service that travelers reached by text message, according to Skift. Davidson says more than $60 million a year of travel was planned through Odessia over the summer by tens of thousands of early users. The figure is his own, and he did not say how much of that travel was booked through Odessia. ## AI Agents Booked Four Uber Rides and About 500 Uber Eats Orders in Halloween Week Uber handled about 320 million rides and food orders in the week of Halloween, one of its largest weeks, chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy said on the company's third-quarter earnings call on November 4. AI agents placed [about 500 of the Uber Eats orders](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/the-ai-gold-rush-billions-pour-into-ai-but-agents-booked-just-four-uber-rides-in-october-s-busiest-w). For rides, he said, "it was a grand total of 4 trips that we have fulfilled from agents". Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, called it "very, very early and very limited traction" and said every company with an AI assistant was in talks with Uber over terms. DoorDash and the largest online travel companies have reported similarly small numbers on their own earnings calls since late October. Tony Xu, DoorDash's chief executive, said the company had seen "maybe several hundred orders in total" from third-party agents. Ewout Steenbergen, chief financial officer of Booking Holdings, said on November 3 that referrals from AI chatbots had accelerated in recent weeks but "still account for significantly less than 1% of Booking.com's room nights". Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, said last week that Airbnb takes nearly half a million bookings a day and that "a very nonmaterial number" of them come through [Meta's agent Muse](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/stripe-link-muse-agentic-payments-rival-agents) and Instinct, another AI assistant. Ariane Gorin, Expedia's chief executive, described what Expedia receives from agents as "a small amount of traffic", and Matt Goldberg, who runs Tripadvisor, put AI platforms at less than 1% of its traffic. ## Travelers Spend More Than Five Hours Researching a Trip, Against 50 Seconds to Book an Uber Ride Booking a ride in Uber's app takes 50 seconds on average, Khosrowshahi told analysts, and three quarters of rides are booked with a single tap. Reordering a favorite meal takes about 90 seconds. An agent can save a customer very little time on a task that short. Travelers in a 2023 Expedia Group study covering seven countries viewed an average of 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days before they booked a trip, and 277 pages in the US, and spent more than five hours doing it. > "Using AI to plan and book extraordinary trips is now a reality." > — Francis Davidson, founder of Odessia Sequoia describes Odessia as a product that "helps plan and book entire trips with one simple conversation". Odessia completed the booking inside the conversation instead of sending the traveler to another company's site. When Booking.com and Expedia launched apps inside ChatGPT in October 2025, bookings were still completed on their own sites. Skift reported that Odessia is accredited by IATA, the airline industry body whose accreditation allows an agency to sell airline tickets. Chesky told analysts that agents such as Muse and Instinct are good at "simple routine tasks, like making a restaurant reservation", but that planning a trip is different because 80% of travelers say they enjoy spending time researching trips. He expects travelers to go to specialized services for complicated purchases. Gorin said AI's "real strength is in discovery" and that travelers "still want to book with a trusted brand where they know that they will be taken care of if something goes wrong". Users of the AI assistants at Priceline and Agoda, two of Booking Holdings' brands, convert at about twice the rate of other users, Steenbergen said, and OpenTable, which Booking also owns, seated 190,000 diners through its integration with OpenAI in September. Goldberg said visitors sent to Tripadvisor's Viator by AI platforms convert at close to five times the site's average, and Gorin described the traffic Expedia receives from agents as "high intent". ## Expedia Shares Fell as Much as 5% After the Odessia Deal Was Reported Expedia shares fell as much as 5% on Tuesday, Booking Holdings as much as 3% and Airbnb as much as 3.5% after the deal was reported, according to Investing.com, on a day when the wider market also fell. Booking.com and Expedia were among the first companies to launch apps inside ChatGPT, and both now pay OpenAI for traffic. Steenbergen said on November 3 that Booking's paid referrals from OpenAI were growing as the two expanded their partnership into more markets, and Gorin confirmed on Expedia's call that it is taking part in OpenAI's advertising program. In March OpenAI scaled back Instant Checkout, which let users pay without leaving the chat, after The Information reported that people researched products in ChatGPT but did not finish buying them there. A spokesperson told Skift at the time that OpenAI was "prioritizing making ChatGPT search and product discovery great", and checkout moved into the apps that partners run inside ChatGPT. Expedia shares rose more than 12% and Booking's 8% that day, Reuters reported. OpenAI has not said whether Odessia's booking technology will be added to ChatGPT. Davidson wrote that he will "have more to share on the shape of the future soon". ## Davidson Says Odessia Ran Strategy, Legal and Finance on AI Agents Davidson spent most of his announcement on how Odessia was run, and he set it against Sonder, which he says he took "from 0 to $600M in revenues which took over a thousand people and a decade". He stepped down as Sonder's chief executive in June 2025. Sonder said on November 10, 2025 that it would wind down and liquidate after Marriott ended a licensing agreement between the two companies, and it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy four days later. At Odessia, he writes, agents were used for strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal work and finance as well as for writing software, and his own use of them rose 25-fold during 2026. The agents had access to the same information as an employee, including meeting recordings, Slack, email and shared documents. Staff gave instructions by voice, which Davidson says is three to four times faster than typing. An agent made the product launch video, and agents tested the APIs of potential partners and produced the spreadsheets and slides comparing them. Davidson says productivity rose sharply once the company removed limits on how much staff could use AI models, and that the most expensive models gave the best return because cheaper ones needed more rounds of correction. His rule of thumb for 2026, he writes, was that "the more expensive a frontier model is per token, the higher its ROI". Davidson now works for OpenAI, which sells such models. ![Four photos of Francis Davidson working on a laptop: on a sofa, at a cafe table, on an exercise bike and in a car seat](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/francis-davidson-odessia-working.webp) *Francis Davidson at work, in photos he posted with the announcement. "My wife was amused by my determination to keep the agents on track in a lot of odd places," he wrote. — Photo: Francis Davidson* The team worked six or seven days a week. "You'd think higher productivity enabled by agents means less effort from us humans but the opposite is true," he writes. For product ideas, Davidson says he kept no roadmap or task list and started an agent on each one as it came to him. Researchers at Harvard and INSEAD who studied Y Combinator companies found that [AI-native startups are 25% smaller than their peers](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-startups-hiring-fewer-junior-staff). ## FAQ **Q: What is Odessia?** Odessia was an AI travel agent, launched in June 2026 by Sonder co-founder Francis Davidson, that planned a trip and booked the transport and accommodation in one conversation. It opened to the public in October as a free service reached by text message. The service closed when OpenAI bought the company, and its website gives an email address for customers with existing bookings. **Q: Can ChatGPT help book flights?** ChatGPT can search for flights and hotels through apps from travel companies, including Expedia and Booking.com, which were among the first to launch inside it in October 2025. At that launch the booking itself was completed on the travel company's own site. OpenAI has not said whether it will add Odessia's ability to make the booking inside the conversation. **Q: Can I use AI as a travel agent?** For planning, yes, and travel companies say that is where most of the use is. Booking through an AI agent is possible in some cases, such as hotel rooms in Google's AI Mode in the US, where the traveler approves the room and pays with Google Pay and the hotel or booking site handles customer service. The numbers are still small. Booking.com says referrals from AI chatbots account for well under 1% of its room nights, and Airbnb calls the number of bookings it receives from AI agents "very nonmaterial".