Turkish Airlines has an MCP server. Visa has AI-ready cards. But nobody has solved travel distribution.
I know this is the worst possible time to post this.
You’re either wrapping presents, recovering from a feast, or finally sitting on a beach somewhere with absolutely no intention of checking LinkedIn.
But if you happen to sneak a look between courses (or après-ski, no judgment), I wrote something that might be worth a holiday read.
“Why your AI travel agent can dream up the perfect trip but can’t book it”
The short version: ChatGPT plans trips. Perplexity finds restaurants. Turkish Airlines just built an MCP server so Claude can check real-time flight status.
Then you ask them to actually complete a transaction, and they fall apart.
It’s not that the AI isn’t smart enough. It’s that there’s no infrastructure for agents to act responsibly in the real world. LLMs are probabilistic—they work with patterns and likelihoods. Commerce requires deterministic execution: verified inventory, authorized payments, accountable outcomes.
Visa CEO Ryan McInerney’s December shareholder letter put it bluntly: “If the interface to commerce becomes a bot, the system still has to know whose money is being spent, what permissions the agent has, and how credentials are presented.”
After 2.5 years building blockchain infrastructure for travel distribution, we think we’ve (accidentally) built exactly what AI agents need.
The article covers:
→ The four problems Big Tech isn’t solving (identity, authorization, payment, traceability)
→ The 2025 protocol explosion—and why fragmentation is the real problem
→ What Turkish Airlines, Kiwi.com, and Sabre are doing with MCP (and why it’s not enough)
→ Why tour operators become more valuable when agents need “merchant of record as a service”
→ Payments: stablecoins today, digital euro tomorrow, bridging on-chain and off-chain by design
If you’re a travel CTO trying to figure out how AI agents will integrate with your systems, this might answer some questions. Apaleo’s CEO rates MCP adoption at 5 out of 10—50% of hotels are still constrained by legacy systems. In the agent era, not being machine-readable is the fastest way to become invisible.
If you’re at Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google working on agentic commerce and curious how blockchain solves the trust gap, let’s connect in January.
Happy holidays. Back to your beach/slopes/couch. 🎄