Meta Enters the AI Travel-Booking Race With Muse, a Flight-Booking Agent Built on Duffel

Meta has launched Muse, a personalized AI agent capable of booking flights, built on infrastructure from Duffel, a UK-based travel data company. The service currently operates only in the US and lets users complete a flight booking either directly through Duffel or via a browser-based transaction, with payments handled through Stripe's Link wallet, which generates single-use virtual cards so the agent never handles a user's real payment details directly. Muse can also store a user's loyalty program details within the chat interface so bookings can be tied to existing frequent-flyer accounts, though Meta says travelers still need to go to an airline's own website for anything beyond the initial booking, such as adding baggage or correcting passenger information. Meta has said it plans to extend Muse's booking capability to accommodation as well. The company describes Muse as having "first-of-its-kind privacy, safety, and security protections engineered into it that no other agent provides," and frames it as an early step toward what it calls personal superintelligence, letting people delegate routine tasks. The launch puts Meta in direct competition with Google, which has added AI-powered travel booking through its AI Mode search feature, and OpenAI, which has been developing a similar booking capability through its Atlas agent, though analysts have questioned how readily consumers will hand Meta their travel and payment details given the company's prior privacy controversies.