Travelport, Booked AI, Basis Theory and Mastercard have announced the successful completion of an end-to-end AI-powered travel booking and payment transaction.
Through the collaboration, an AI travel agent searched, booked, paid for and ticketed a live flight without the customer leaving the conversation and without the agent ever seeing the underlying card number. It marks the first time an AI agent has autonomously ticketed a flight directly with an airline.
As consumers increasingly engage with AI-powered commerce experiences, the collaboration demonstrated a fully integrated and secure travel booking experience in an AI agent environment.
It brought together Travelport’s travel retailing and connectivity, Mastercard’s agentic payment capabilities, Booked AI’s conversational travel platform and Basis Theory’s payment vault to search, book, pay for and ticket a flight from a major carrier.
Booked AI’s AI travel agent sourced a live New Distribution Capability (NDC) offer from a major airline through Travelport TripServices.
Once the customer confirmed the flight and fare details in the conversation platform, Mastercard Agent Pay enabled the agent-initiated payment using a secure tokenised credential, with the underlying card credential held in Basis Theory’s PCI-compliant vault.
Following payment authorisation, the booking was processed and ticketed through Travelport’s and the airline’s own systems, demonstrating how AI-driven travel experiences can be deployed without requiring separate or fragmented booking or payment rails.
Trust and transparency were built in at every step. The customer approved the specific booking and amount before payment, and Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent linked that approval to the transaction so the payment could be checked against the customer’s instructions.
Had the transaction details not matched the approved intent and consent, the payment would not have proceeded and any further purchase would require a new approval from the cardholder.
Importantly, the airline remained the merchant throughout. Processing the payment itself with no intermediary checkout in between, demonstrating that airlines can sell through AI agents while keeping control of how they are paid.
“AI agents will become a major channel for air travel and airlines shouldn’t have to give up control of the sale or the payment to be part of it,” said Andrew Jordan, Chief Technology Officer at Travelport.
“This booking shows they don’t have to: consent is verifiable, the underlying card number never touches the agent and the airline gets paid on rails it already trusts.
“That’s what TripServices is built for – making airline content bookable by whichever agent a traveller chooses.”
“Our commitment is to replicate the human travel agent experience end to end by understanding what a traveller needs and taking care of everything through to ticketing in a trusted environment,” said Mennan Yelkenci, Founder & CEO at Booked AI.
“This booking is a concrete step towards that. The flow remains agentic throughout: the customer approves once and that approval is what the payment is checked against.”
“We’re expecting too much from general-purpose agents right now,” said James Armstead, CTO at Basis Theory.
“The experiences that will get people using agents are well-designed paths, like booking travel, that let consumers describe the trip they need and empower the agent to handle the booking, with a secure way to pay on their behalf.”
