Travala's AI Agent Books 2.2 Million Hotels—and Pays in Crypto

Juan Otero, CEO of Travala, joins CoinDesk's Jennifer Sanasie on Markets Outlook to explain how the company's new AI travel agent lets users book any of 2.2 million hotels across more than 230 countries simply by chatting. Instead of navigating search filters and checkout forms, travelers describe what they want and the agent handles the rest. Otero walks through the plumbing that makes it work: Travala uses BNB Chain's machine payment protocol for gasless transactions, so users aren't forced to hold native tokens just to pay fees, and Binance Pay for settlement. That combination is designed to make crypto payments invisible to the end user while keeping the underlying rails on-chain. The bigger vision extends well beyond hotels. Otero lays out a future in which agents anywhere can book hotels, flights, activities, and car rentals on crypto rails—turning autonomous software into a genuine distribution channel for travel commerce.