Mastercard and Trip.com Pilot an AI Agent That Books and Pays for Travel

Mastercard and Trip.com are piloting an AI agent that searches for travel, books it and pays for it. The system was unveiled at Arabian Travel Market in Dubai, and the payments company Network International is taking part.

The pilot runs on Mastercard's Agent Suite for Merchants, which lets merchants build AI-driven shopping tools into the systems they already operate. The tools sit inside existing merchant infrastructure rather than in a separate application. Mastercard supplies the payments network and the gateway infrastructure for the arrangement.

Trip.com is using the pilot to upgrade TripGenie, its AI travel assistant. The upgrade changes what the assistant can do: it can now complete a travel booking, not just suggest one. That is the line between a recommendation tool and a transaction channel.

Who handles what

Network International covers acquiring for the region in this pilot, which puts it on the merchant side of the card transaction while Mastercard carries the network and gateway layer.

The setup is a working example of agentic commerce. In that model, an AI agent handles a purchase on a person's behalf, acting only with that person's approval.

What the companies say

Mete Güney, Mastercard's executive vice president of market development for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said the collaboration with Trip.com and Network International shows how consumers can transact with confidence using new solutions.

Schubert Lou, chief executive of Trip.com, said the company's role is to make the journey from planning through booking and payment simpler, faster and more connected.

Scope and timing

The pilot covers select travel services, including attractions and add-on bookings. The partners plan a phased rollout, with a commercial launch targeted for early 2027.

Agentic commerce asks payment networks to handle something they were not originally built for: a purchase initiated by software instead of a person tapping a button. Proving that a human authorised the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself, and that verification is what merchants and card networks have to agree on before agents can be trusted with real money at scale.

Travel suits that test because a single trip is really a chain of purchases, each with its own supplier, price and cancellation rules. Flights, a hotel, a museum ticket and an airport transfer are separate transactions that a traveller stitches together by hand. An agent that can only assemble options leaves the last mile to the customer; one that can close the sale reaches into the payment rails. The pilot limits itself to a slice of those bookings to find out which parts hold up.

The wider rollout and the early 2027 commercial launch are the next milestones the two companies have set.