OpenAI Buys AI Travel Agent Odessia and Hires Sonder Co-Founder Francis Davidson

Davidson announced the deal on Tuesday in a post on X. Terms were not disclosed, and OpenAI has not commented publicly on its plans for the technology. "We'll have more to share on the shape of the future soon," Davidson wrote.

The purchase gives OpenAI a team that has built a working booking agent of its own. Until now ChatGPT has mostly relied on partners for travel. Booking.com and Expedia were among the first apps available inside ChatGPT when OpenAI opened its app platform in October 2025, letting users search their inventory without leaving the chat. Investors took the deal as a sign that OpenAI wants to handle more of the transaction itself. Expedia was last trading down nearly 4%, Booking Holdings more than 2% and Tripadvisor more than 3%, according to Seeking Alpha.

Odessia started in June with a team of eight in San Francisco and raised about $6 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital, according to Skift. It opened to the public on October 14 as a free concierge that users reached by text message. The company sought travel-agency accreditation in its first week and holds IATA accreditation, which means it can complete bookings itself instead of sending customers to another site. It also offered perks at 2,000 hotels.

The service was designed to research hundreds of options in about a minute, keep watch on trips and events for users, and build preference profiles from persistent memory and booking confirmations in Gmail, Unite.ai reported. It said it covered thousands of destinations and hundreds of thousands of hotels, which it rated on 12 dimensions.

Davidson said tens of thousands of early adopters used Odessia during summer 2026, and that travel planned through the service ran at more than $60 million a year. That figure counts the value of trips planned, not Odessia's revenue, which has not been disclosed.

It is unclear whether Odessia will survive as a product. Unite.ai reported that the standalone service has closed as part of the transition, and that the company's website now says the service is no longer available and directs customers with existing bookings to its support email. Skift noted that Davidson did not say whether Odessia would continue as a standalone company.

Davidson co-founded Sonder, the short-term rental and hotel operator, and grew it to $600 million in revenue before it went into administration in November 2025. Skift's analysis said OpenAI was buying a team that built a working AI travel agent in months and a founder with a decade of experience running lodging, not Odessia's revenue.

Davidson has also described Odessia as a test case for running a company largely on AI agents. Agents were used across strategy, partnerships, design, marketing, customer support, legal and finance as well as engineering, and handled routine work such as daily analytics and matching accounts-payable records. He estimated that work taking about 40 hours by hand could be finished in about two hours with frontier-model agents, and said the remaining bottleneck was people's capacity to review what the agents produced.

OpenAI has been adding travel advertising and in-chat purchasing to ChatGPT, and the open question for online travel agencies is whether Odessia's booking capability ends up inside ChatGPT, where it would compete with the partners already listed there. Neither company has said what happens to those partnerships.