Travel Stocks Fall on Worries Meta's Muse May Eat Their Lunch -- Barrons.com

By Anita Hamilton

The buzzy release of Meta's artificial intelligence personal assistant Muse earlier this month has been good for Meta stock, which has surged more than 20% since its announcement. But other stocks are feeling the pain, namely travel companies whose bread and butter is booking flights and places to stay on vacation-something Muse can now do too.

Shares of Expedia, Booking Holdings, TripAdvisor and AirBnb were all falling Tuesday, with Expedia seeing the biggest drop of 5.5% to $265.60 by midday.

The stock drops coincide with the Muse app topping the list of free apps in Apple's App store on Tuesday.

A new report from Bloomberg Intelligence lays out the problem for travel companies. Analysts Mandeep Singh and William Tong argue that if agents such as Muse siphon off just 5% to 10% of their business, along with that of ride-sharing and delivery firms, their combined revenue loss could exceed $5 billion. "Marketplaces could face lower direct traffic, new distribution costs and weaker customer ownership, while agent providers and mobile operating system owners gain leverage over discovery and transactions," the analysts added.

Muse isn't the only AI personal agent that could eat into travel sites lunch either. Instinct, a text-based rival from privately-held Spear Street, launched this summer. Paypal and Stripe are also developing agentic payment systems, while Mastercard and Visa have partnered with Alchemy to do so much the same.

Write to Anita Hamilton at anita.hamilton@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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September 22, 2026 13:39 ET (17:39 GMT)