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Dear readers,
Have you ever asked a chatbot to find you a hotel? Now imagine you donât even open Booking.com. You text your assistant on WhatsApp â âfind me a hotel with a pool in Paris for May, under âŹ250â â and it comes back with three options, books one, and pays for it.
That is the promise of Meta Muse. And the market did not like it at all for Booking Holdings.
As we discussed in our Booking Holdings thesis earlier this month, the biggest open question for Booking is not the numbers. The numbers speak by themselves. The question is disruption by AI agents. Muse is the first agent that makes that question real for normal people, not only for tech enthusiasts.
What is Meta Muse?
Muse is Metaâs personal AI agent, and it went from zero to #1 in the App Store in days
Muse is a personal AI agent launched by Meta on September 8, 2026, in the US. It is powered by the Muse Spark family of models, built by Meta Superintelligence Labs (the first Muse Spark model was introduced in April 2026).
The difference with ChatGPT is important. A chatbot answers questions. An agent does things: it fills in forms, sends emails, compares prices, books restaurants and pays. You can use it in its own app, on the web, on Mac, or directly inside WhatsApp.
The pricing is simple: a free tier, plus âPowerâ at $20/month and âMaximumâ at $100/month for heavier users.
And the adoption has been spectacular:
c.730,000 downloads in the first five days (Sensor Tower, via CNBC).
More than 2.5 million downloads in its first two weeks (CNN).
It overtook ChatGPT as the #1 free iOS app in the US.
JPMorgan said Muse could become the most widely used consumer AI app since ChatGPT. Raymond James went further and estimated, in its base case, more than $50bn of eventual revenue. These are analyst estimates, not company numbers, but they tell you how seriously Wall Street is taking it.
At Meta Connect (September 23), Zuckerberg doubled down: Muse is coming to Metaâs AI glasses, gets a real-time video avatar, and a small wearable device called Muse Charm. New integrations were announced with Walmart, Best Buy, Instacart, PayPal and â the one that matters for us â Expedia.
Why Meta is a different kind of threat
We have seen many âtravel killersâ before. Google Travel. ChatGPT plugins. Dozens of AI trip-planning startups. None of them moved the needle.
So why is Muse different? Because of distribution. Meta has c.3.6bn daily users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (Skift). OpenAI, Google and Perplexity donât own a messaging app at WhatsAppâs scale. An agent that lives in the app where people already plan trips with their friends is a very different animal from a website you have to remember to visit.
đŹ My view: Muse is the first AI agent that I believe has a real chance to become a daily habit for hundreds of millions of non-technical people. That is what makes it relevant for Booking.
