Former Heads of Google Travel and Tripadvisor Form AI Startup to Head Off Online Travel Agencies

Yahoo

5 days ago

DirectBooker, a startup backed by former Tripadvisor CEO Steve Kaufer and ex-Google Travel head Richard Holden, wants to feed hotel listings directly into AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini — challenging the role of online travel agencies like Booking.com.
'The default behavior is going to be for the OTAs to win again,' said Sanjay Vakil, a co-founder and the CEO of DirectBooker. 'And I would like to head off that outcome. But it's going to take more than three people to do that, so we're looking to grow a little bit.'
Vakil held various product management leadership roles at Google Travel and Tripadvisor. The other two co-founders of DirectBooker are Chief Product Officer Theresa Meyer and Chief Technology Officer George Madrid.
The Problem to Solve
With increasing numbers of consumers searching for travel on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic, and Gemini, online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Tripadvisor are establishing partnerships with them to deliver hotel inventory.
Vakil said DirectBooker wants to establish relationships with hotels and deliver more robust and comprehensive hotel data to the LLMs. The would be for hotels to attract direct bookings –bypassing the OTAs.
Holden, Kaufer, and Vakil published their thoughts in a post called 'Winning the AI Era: How Hotels Can Break Free From OTA Dependence.'
Vakil believes that most travelers want to book directly with hotels, and that they would benefit from more detailed hotel information, lower prices, and additional perks.
'There's this opportunity for hotels to showcase themselves to best advantage that's really been missing,' Vakil said.
The startup is calling these 'direct bookings' though travelers would still be going first to LLMs – it's not as direct as going to, say, Marriott.com.
What Is the Competitive Moat?
DirectBooker claims it has a tech advantage. It plans to use Model Context Protocol (MCP) technology, which is an open standard and, it argues, can deliver better data. But the same technology is available to competitors as well.
'There's a world in which the OTAs sort of put an MCP layer on top of that [their feeds] and provide that information to the LLMs,' Vakil said. 'I haven't seen it happen yet, and I can imagine technological mismatches that make that more difficult than it should be. We're building our stuff from the ground up.'
DirectBooker Is In Startup Mode
DirectBooker is at a very early stage. It received pre-seed backing from venture firm Baukunst, and has raised around $2 million from investors, including Kaufer and Holden. The three co-founders are working on DirectBooker, as well as a half-dozen contractors, Vakil said.
The startup doesn't have a product or hotel partnerships yet, although it has been speaking with hotels for about a year.
Vakil thinks the startup would probably use traditional CPC and CPA models to get paid, but the business model isn't the focus for now.
'I think the industry has settled on particularly expensive transactions, but they don't need to be that expensive,' Vakil said. 'We should be able to get people to them inexpensively, partly because I get to avoid a bunch of the costs that the OTAs have. I don't need customer service. I don't need to worry about protecting customer data. I'm just handing people directly over to the hotel, who already has to do that.'
For now, DirectBooker.com, a consumer website, is just turf to test ideas. The real play would revolve around hotel and LLM partnerships.
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