There is a new condition going around the travel industry, and one veteran observer has diagnosed himself with it: launchitis. The symptom is a foggy inability to remember which AI travel app you were excited about, because a fresh one lands every few weeks. Reading about one makes sense in the moment — then the next announcement arrives and wipes it from memory.
The trigger is a genuine wave of product launches. Booking Holdings rolled out an assistant called Lola in late September, and barely two weeks later, on October 14, a new player called Vayo entered private beta with a reported plan for Booking to invest $100 million. That sits on top of existing AI work already happening inside Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda and Kayak — meaning one parent company alone is running multiple assistant projects at once.
It is not just the big incumbents. Muse and Instinct have added travel as a use case for their general-purpose AI assistants, treating trip planning as another job for a broad digital helper rather than a specialist tool. And Francis Davidson, co-founder of accommodation startup Sonder, launched his own entry, Odessia, back in June. The Skift commentary reportedly began with a weary note along the lines of: another one.
Why does this matter if you are not an app developer? Because the way people plan and book trips is genuinely in flux. For years the playbook was the same: search flights, compare hotels, assemble an itinerary yourself across a dozen tabs. The new pitch is a single conversational assistant that handles the lot — asking where you fancy going, watching prices, rebooking when things go wrong. If even one of these tools delivers, it could change how a lot of holidays get planned.
The catch, and the reason the writer's 'launchitis' joke lands, is that travellers cannot yet tell the contenders apart. Names blur together — Lola, Vayo, Muse, Instinct, Odessia — and none has clearly established itself as the default. Many are in beta, meaning availability is limited and features are still rough. Meanwhile the companies behind them are spending serious money: a $100 million investment signal tells you the industry expects this to be a big deal even if nobody knows which product wins.
For now, the practical takeaway is simple. You do not need to download every new assistant that appears. Most travellers are best served by sticking with the AI features already built into the booking platforms they use anyway — Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak and Agoda are all layering assistants into their existing apps, which are free and battle-tested. Treat the flood of standalone launches with curiosity rather than FOMO, and wait for a clear frontrunner to emerge. Given the pace of announcements, that could be next week — or five more apps from now.
