Your next customer might ask AI to book for them

I’ve used AI to find restaurants in a city I’m visiting, work out what to do in the afternoon or see how to get from one place to another without crossing half the city. So far, when it’s come to booking, I’ve done it myself.

But more than once I’ve thought about asking it to do the part that takes me the most time. Open a few websites, look for somewhere to stay on my dates and tell me what it would cost to book through each one. While it’s at it, check whether I can cancel, whether I can arrive late and whether I’ll still have time for dinner when I get off the train.

A comparison site can filter by price and neighbourhood. What I’d like to hand over to an assistant is the work of putting all those requirements together and checking which options still fit when I look at them more closely.

Find a hotel for my trip

Imagine we arrive in Valencia at nine on a Friday evening and leave on Sunday. There are two of us. We want to spend no more than €280 on accommodation, walk there from the station and be able to cancel if our plans change. We’d like to have dinner nearby after dropping off our bags.

I’d ask something like this.

Find three places to stay for two people from Friday to Sunday. Our train arrives at Joaquín Sorolla at nine in the evening. The limit is €280 in total. Check the property’s own website and a booking site. For each option, tell me how much the whole stay costs, the cancellation deadline and whether we can check in at that time. Give me the links where you checked each rate. Flag anything you haven’t been able to verify. For now, just compare.

If the train time is already in my email, an assistant I’ve given access to can use the confirmation to plan around it. Google describes using Gmail this way in its trip-planning tool. We can also give the assistant our arrival time ourselves and start there. For this search, that’s enough. Google on planning trips with Gemini

Put the two rates side by side

Say the assistant finds the same room for €246 on a booking site and €264 on the hotel’s website. These are made-up prices for two people staying two nights. If the assistant sorts the options by price, the first one looks like the better deal.

Open both rates and you find the detail that makes the decision. The €246 rate is non-refundable. The €264 rate can be cancelled until six on Thursday evening. That extra €18 buys you something specific. If the trip might change, the €246 rate doesn’t meet the requirements we gave the assistant.

That’s where an assistant starts saving me time. It can put two offers side by side when the sites present them differently and point out where they differ. To do that properly, it has to check it’s looking at the same room, for the same guests and dates. I’d also like it to show the total cost of the stay and how much I’ll be charged today separately. Both figures are worth seeing before I decide.

And if all it’s found is ‘from €123 a night’, I want to know. It might have seen a price in a search result before the hotel’s calendar returned a rate for those dates. At that point I can use the link to carry on looking. The price still needs checking.

The last click changes things

Up to this point, if the assistant gets something wrong, I can open the link and check. Once I ask it to book, a mistake with the date or rate can leave me with a charge and a booking I have to sort out later.

There’s already a real example of how far this has gone. Google lets people search for and complete some hotel bookings in AI Mode in Google Search. Its help page says the feature is available in the United States, in English and for selected properties. The person chooses the room, checks the summary and confirms payment. The provider they book with processes the payment, sends the confirmation and handles any changes. Google Help on booking a hotel in AI Mode

If I handed over that step, I’d want the assistant to show me the exact offer I’m about to accept. The property name, the dates, the room, the total, what I’ll be charged today and when the cancellation window closes. If €264 turns into €279 just before I pay, it’s still within my budget. I’d still prefer it to ask me. I want to confirm the rate I’m agreeing to.

Afterwards, I’d want something as simple as a booking reference and an email from the provider. If the page is still loading after payment, the first thing to find out is whether the booking went through. Pressing the button again could leave me with two bookings for the same weekend.

What does the assistant find when it reaches your website?

On 4 November, Cloudflare introduced tools that show which AI assistants visit your website and which pages they open. You can also decide which ones to let in. Recognising an assistant helps you see where it’s been. Your website and booking engine still need to handle what it can look up, when to check a price again and how a booking is confirmed. Cloudflare’s announcement

Now put yourself in the hotel’s shoes. Your site says the reception desk is open until midnight, but that information is in an image. The booking engine shows the cancellation policy after you choose a rate. And the link the assistant shares opens the calendar without the dates it already looked up.

The customer gets a recommendation that sounds right. When they reach your site, they have to look up the reception hours, enter their dates again and find out whether they’re still seeing the same rate. Some of the work took place away from your website. What the customer has left to do looks a lot like what we found when we followed a booking that someone didn’t finish. The customer was about to book. What made them close the page?

The first test I’d run on your website

I’d start with a question a customer already asks you. For a hotel, it might be whether they can arrive at ten at night. For car hire, how much they’ll pay when they book and how much will be held on their card when they pick up the vehicle.

I’d ask an assistant to find the answer and take me to the exact page where I could carry on. Then I’d open that link on my phone and check three things. Can I find the condition the assistant mentioned? Are the dates still there or do I have to start again? Do I see the same amount when I select the rate?

If something fails, you now have something specific to fix. The website might need to explain a condition more clearly, the link might need to keep the search details, or the information might need to come from the booking engine.

If you run a hotel, a vehicle hire business or any business that takes bookings online, tell me what customers usually ask before they book. We can follow that question on your website and see what they find, where they have to start again and what’s worth changing. Tell me how booking works on your website