Uber and DoorDash aren’t the only major consumer platforms finding out that customers still don’t really want an AI agent booking things for them. Airbnb has now said much the same thing, revealing on its Q3 2026 earnings call that traffic and bookings coming from AI agents like Meta’s Muse and the buzzy startup Instinct are barely worth mentioning.
Asked by an analyst about reports of early agent adoption skewing heavily toward travel, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky didn’t sugarcoat it. “We’re not seeing a lot of traffic, and even fewer bookings from Muse and Instinct yet. We do have nearly half a million bookings a day, and a very non-material number of bookings happen on Muse and Instinct. So, you know, we’re talking very, very low numbers,” Chesky said. He added that the trickle of traffic Airbnb does see from these agents “peaked in early October” and has stayed flat since, with no sign of a breakout yet.
Despite the weak numbers, Chesky was careful to frame agents as an opportunity rather than a competitive threat. “My general philosophy on agents are I’m generally excited about them. I don’t see them as a threat. I see them kind of like Google, as an opportunity for more people to discover Airbnb,” he said, adding that he expects agents to act as a “great handoff” to Airbnb rather than a replacement for it.
To explain why he thinks travel bookings will resist being fully handed over to agents, Chesky drew a distinction between what he called item-based retailers and project-based retailers. “You go to Walgreens, you don’t plan to go to Walgreens. You need to get something, you go to Walgreens. You go to Ikea or Home Depot, that’s a project-based retailer. You have a whole project. You don’t go to those places to get one item,” he said. Airbnb, in his view, sits firmly in the second category. “We’re really long-term, we want to be in the business of the entire trip. That’s an entire project. It involves where to stay, what to do, how to get there, all in one place. It’s highly logistical.”
Chesky also pointed to the social and visual nature of booking a stay as a reason agents aren’t a natural fit yet. He noted that guests typically travel in groups of three or more, and that roughly 90% of guests message their host before booking, something hosts themselves also want. “The host wants to know who’s in their home, so they want to have a connection. They don’t want to offload it to an agent. If I’m hosting somebody, I want to talk to the person, not the agent on behalf of the person,” he said. On top of that, he pointed out just how visual the shopping experience is, with guests typically browsing a dozen or more listings and often flipping through 25 photos per listing.
There’s also a behavioral argument Chesky has leaned on before: people like planning trips almost as much as taking them. “There’s a lot of studies that show people enjoy anticipating travel more than actually traveling,” he said, adding a detail he called “a fun fact”: most of Airbnb’s traffic happens during the nine-to-five workday. “These people are supposed to be working, and they’re not. We have evidence. People are actually secretly using Airbnb. Maybe they’re trying to escape their job.” His conclusion is that this aspirational, browsing-heavy behavior is exactly the kind of thing people don’t want to hand off. “I don’t think a lot of people want to offload all that to an agent. I think they want to offload the things they don’t enjoy, not the things they do enjoy.”
The comments land just a day after Uber’s CFO disclosed that AI agents accounted for only around 500 Uber Eats orders and four Uber rides out of roughly 320 million trips and orders during the company’s busiest week of the year, and a week after DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said third-party agents had generated only a “several hundred” orders against the company’s roughly 1 billion quarterly total. Airbnb itself has been talking up AI gains elsewhere in its business, with Chesky previously saying AI has become the best thing to happen to the company thanks to faster product development and cheaper customer support. But when it comes to outside agents actually booking trips on a user’s behalf, Chesky’s numbers suggest that’s still very much a work in progress. Airbnb has said it plans to launch its own AI travel agent sometime in the first half of 2027, built around a richer, more visual interface than a basic chatbot.