kabarsula OpenAI buys AI travel agent Odessia as Australian club touts its own concierge bandar SLOT INDONESIA

OpenAI has acquired AI travel agent Odessia – a startup less than a year old – with founder Francis Davidson joining the AI lab to work on the future of travel, TechCrunch has reported.

Terms were not disclosed, but TechCrunch said the deal looks like an acqui-hire. Odessia, which raised a US$6 million (around AU$ 8.7m) pre-seed round led by Sequoia and launched about five months ago, has already been shut down.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch, describing Davidson as a proven founder who has built multiple travel businesses. The company has not announced any travel-specific products, but it counts Booking.com, Expedia and KAYAK among its customers or partners. The spokesperson said 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, including to plan trips.

Davidson is well known in travel as the founder of Sonder, the short-term apartment rental company he started as a college student in 2014. According to TechCrunch, Sonder went public via a SPAC, then collapsed into bankruptcy after a key partnership with Marriott fell through.

Australian members-only travel club BookingClub.com.au was quick to respond, saying the deal “proves agentic AI travel is here to stay”. The club, which says it has more than 1,100 members, runs an AI concierge that books closed user group hotel rates and connects to Claude and ChatGPT.

A BookingClub spokesperson said: “Odessia showed that people want to plan travel by talking to an AI, not by opening twenty tabs.”

The club also cited IATA’s 2026 Global Passenger Survey, which found 49 per cent of travellers have used AI for travel planning, rising to 57 per cent in Asia-Pacific.