What happens when AI agents stop just planning travel and start actually booking it?

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, I catch up with Kevin Gautier, CEO and founder of Jinko — almost exactly one year after we first spoke about what he was building.

Kevin is a four-time travel founder whose journey has taken him from video travel reviews and NDC aggregation to a Gen Z flight app that reached #2 in the French App Store, a stint helping build Hopper in Europe, and now Jinko.

And Jinko has evolved significantly.

Originally conceived as a consumer travel app inside ChatGPT, Jinko has pivoted to something potentially much bigger: the travel infrastructure layer for AI agents.

We dig into:

🤖 Why AI agents will need their own travel infrastructure — just as websites and apps needed APIs before them

✈️ How an AI assistant could search and book flights, hotels, trains, experiences and rental cars without becoming a travel company itself

🔌 Why Jinko is protocol-agnostic, supporting MCP, MCP Apps, APIs and CLI integrations

🛒 How agentic travel could shift us from booking individual components to handing an agent an entire trip to fulfil

🎯 Why traveller intent may become one of the most valuable pieces of the travel booking puzzle

🏨 Whether AI could finally give individual hotels and experience operators a better chance of competing directly with OTAs

🤝 The potential for agent-to-agent negotiation — where hotels could compete using breakfast, upgrades, dining credits and other benefits rather than simply price

💳 Why agentic payments remain one of the biggest hurdles — particularly when travellers are being asked to trust an AI agent with a $3,000+ transaction

⚙️ Why API connectivity remains critical even in an AI world

💰 How Jinko makes money through API calls, revenue share and transaction fees

🌍 And why Kevin expects travel distribution to explode into entirely new places as more non-travel companies begin embedding travel into their products.

One of Kevin's most interesting observations comes from the actual prompts Jinko sees: people aren't naturally asking AI to buy an isolated hotel or flight. They're asking it to plan the trip.

That seemingly small difference could have enormous consequences for OTAs, suppliers and the entire structure of travel distribution.

We also get into the question I find particularly fascinating: Who wins when your AI agent becomes the travel buyer?

Hear the episode here.

In 2026 the podcast is now found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and now also YouTube (and if you hit subscribe there, you get it before everyone else). You can also catch up on the whole of Series 1 now also fully available in these channels.

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