B2A? AI Agents Are Travel’s New Audience — And They Don’t Care About Brands

Expedia Group is building a dedicated marketing function aimed not at travelers or business clients, but at AI agents — an emerging strategy often referred to as B2A, or business to agent.

The logic is simple: People use brand recognition or loyalty to streamline purchase decisions. AI agents don’t need shortcuts. They reason through every option, and the competitive edge shifts from name familiarity to whether an agent can find and evaluate what makes a property, route, or package different.

“Agents are becoming a new audience, in addition to businesses and consumers,” Expedia Chief Marketing Officer Jochen Koedijk said at an Expedia Explore panel in Las Vegas this week. “This is not a transition from consumer to agent, but it’s in parallel.”

For now, that shift is barely visible in booking behavior.

Less than 1.5% of Expedia’s traffic is coming from answer engine optimization efforts, or AEO