Simplifying Travel: How MCP Connects AI to Real-Time Hotel Data
9 min read
Planning a dream trip to Japan or that long-awaited European adventure should feel thrilling. Instead, many travelers find themselves drowning in a sea of booking sites, conflicting reviews, apps, and endless spreadsheets. When investing potentially thousands of dollars and precious vacation days, the pressure to validate every detail can turn excitement into anxiety.
As an example, travelers choosing a hotel tap into many sources of information – multiple, sometimes dozens of “touchpoints” spread across search, apps, and websites – before making a decision. According to a Google/McKinsey study:
“The data [shows] finding travel accommodations is protracted, complex, and sometimes annoying: an average purchase journey for a single hotel room lasts 36 days; hits 45 touchpoints, distributed among search engines and the sites of intermediaries and suppliers; and involves multiple devices. Travel is a complex, high anxiety purchase.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. By connecting a huge array of real-time travel information to new AI tools, MCP will make the next generation of travel planning more personalized, less fragmented, and more fun. Foundational AIs linked with MCP can bring consumers tailored information about prices, property features, special offers, keying off consumers’ unique travel criteria and pulling together the information that matters to them.
The Challenge of Fragmented Travel Planning
Consumers research so many resources because they have complex criteria that they’re attempting to satisfy. And they seek details that are spread across many sites: granular amenities details, location options, information about the city, nearby attractions, and many, many others. At each step, their context and prior research may be lost, causing an effortful and frustrating experience.
One way to view this is that consumers are not simply comparing prices. Rather, they’re looking to gain confidence on multiple fronts:
Best pricing: ensuring they’re not overpaying.
Booking Flexibility: such as easier modifications, flexible cancellation, or an earlier check-in
Loyalty status integration: seeing how their memberships and points translate into savings or perks and guaranteed loyalty recognition.
Accurate information on property features: like airport shuttles, adjoining rooms, family services, accessibility features, or amenities such as bike rentals.
Ancillary Opportunities: the ability to plan dining, activities, or experiences during the trip.
This information is scattered, often incomplete, and easily lost when switching between sites. On top of that, travelers worry that they’ve missed a better price, a more suitable room, or an exclusive perk hidden behind yet another website. The best tool often remains a shared document that, over time, details the frustrating and time-consuming process.
How Foundational AIs Help
A straightforward benefit of state-of-the-art AI tools is an easier customer journey by consolidating the process into a single, conversational user experience. Foundational AIs can:
Maintain continuity of traveler preferences through the discussion.
Allow travelers to move seamlessly from broad exploration ("Which neighborhoods are best?") to specific questions: "Do the rooms have a walk-in shower?”
Surface details about destinations, neighborhoods, attractions, and hotels.
Instead of restarting and re-searching on each new website, the traveler stays in one conversational flow. Early feedback suggests this experience is far superior to today’s multi-site paradigm.
However, AI alone is insufficient. When the traveler is close to the decision point, accuracy is non-negotiable. Travelers need accurate prices, up-to-date availability, and to understand exactly what they’re purchasing. Subsets, estimates, generic answers, reasonable guesses, and extrapolations aren’t enough. Without access to live data, AI risks hallucinations or probabilistic, but inaccurate answers. This is where Model Context Protocol (MCP) plays a critical role.
The Role of MCP
Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects the conversational AI experience to the content in real-world hotel systems. Below are a few examples, but these are by no means exhaustive. By securely connecting AI models to dynamic, authenticated, and context-specific information, MCP ensures that travelers can:
See real-time availability and best pricing.
Confirm loyalty program details and member-only rates.
Validate critical property features like adjoining rooms, pet policies, or bike rentals.
Explore and purchase ancillary services (restaurant reservations, tee times, spa hours, local tours).
Receive personalized offers and upgrades that match their loyalty status, preferences, and trip context.
Foundational AIs and MCP promise to transform travel research into a single, seamless journey. Instead of switching between dozens of tabs and apps, travelers can ask questions, validate options, and book. The breadth of capabilities is well beyond simply providing inventory via feeds. It takes advantage of secure real-time requests to personal data about travelers and the opportunities to delight them.
1. Availability and Pricing
MCP enables Foundational AI companies to tap into other elements of the travel ecosystem to gain access to availability, rates, and inventory (ARI) data for hotels. This allows travelers to know exactly what rooms are available to book in a city, or in a particular hotel, their prices, and characteristics. Few travelers will be able to complete their travel plans without this information. All current Foundational AI models can do is to clumsily link travelers into new interfaces to find accurate prices and to actually book the room.
In order to have the confidence to complete a transaction, travelers need to:
Know exactly which room types are available.
See accurate pricing that reflects current promotions.
Be able to securely complete their transactions.
Currently, this information is shared with large hotel search partners via data feeds, which are updated regularly and cached in large databases. These feeds – of which there are hundreds – are provided by hotel chains or by independent hotels through technology integration partners. While Foundational AI companies have the engineering talent to replicate these integrations, caches, and mappings, it is much more likely that they will choose to query a small number of MCP servers that handle those integrations instead. Aggregator MCP servers will provide accurate prices across complete hotel inventory. And when a hotel allows bookings to be done via an AI agent, the MCP endpoint can immediately make completing the reservation available to the traveler.
2. Loyalty Benefits and Personalization
Loyalty programs are central to modern hospitality not just with the hotel or chain. It could also be with travelers’ preferred travel credit card or membership organization. Foundational AI companies can only tell travelers the generic benefits associated with their loyalty programs based on public data sources. Traveler-specific information is carefully (and appropriately!) locked behind authentication and isn’t broadly available. However, it is incredibly valuable for a traveler to understand how their dutifully gained points or affinity can be used to reduce the cost of a hotel or gain access to valuable perks. Without this information, a savvy traveler will step outside of the AI to take advantage of their points and here, the seamless experience stumbles.
MCP enables:
Secure authentication of traveler memberships.
Display of live balances and member rates.
Suggestion of points redemption alternatives alongside cash rates.
Highlighting of membership perks appropriate to the travelers level: free breakfast, upgrades, or late checkout.
For example: “You have 62,000 points, which covers two free nights and breakfast at the Rosewood Resort.” Instead of exiting the AI conversation to check balances, the traveler sees value directly in context, encouraging loyalty and direct booking.
3. Accurate Property Features
Some booking decisions require details that the public sources available to AIs cannot reliably answer. Getting this information has required the traveler to pick up the phone, fill out a form, or start a conversation over another tool, like WhatsApp. Once again, this breaks the seamless, conversational flow that AI promises, and splinters context across channels.
MCP can go far beyond public data sources and connect to private information provided by the hotel, such as structured data, FAQs, or trained chatbots. The very best answers may be provided by the staff, owners, or managers. MCP can even query the staff, owners, or managers via a live chat on behalf of a traveler. Using this breadth of tools, MCP ensures factual accuracy to queries like:
Adjoining rooms or specific room configurations.
Accessibility features (roll-in showers, elevator proximity).
Amenity availability (bike rentals, rooftop pool hours, kids’ club).
Local transportation support (shuttles, late-night taxis).
Again, MCP does this without breaking the traveler from their research flow to call, text, or email the property.
4. Ancillary Upsells and Experiences
Many hotels delight travelers through associated experiences in and around accommodations themselves. MCP can guide travelers to these ancillary revenue streams by making upsells part of the booking flow. Instead of waiting until check-in, travelers can explore additional activities directly within the AI experience:
Book a table at the hotel restaurant.
Reserve tee times or spa sessions.
Add excursions or guided tours.
Upgrade their room with one click.
For example: “You’ve selected a Deluxe King room. Would you like to add a couples’ spa package at a discounted rate?” This turns planning into a holistic experience, covering both accommodation and activities.
In some cases the hotel chooses not to list all of their offerings in a public location to prevent disappointment: it is highly limited to a handful of slots. MCP makes it possible to reveal it contextually, right when the traveler shows strong intent, turning an ordinary booking into an upgraded experience.
Where MCP can really shine is through its auto-discovery mechanism: when a hotel allows bookings to be done at its restaurant via an AI agent, the MCP endpoint can advertise it and immediately make it available to the traveler.
5. Personalized Offers
The capability offered here by MCP can help to create real-time offers directly within the conversation that the traveler is having to plan their trip. These offers can be designed around live inventory, take into account exactly what the traveler is interested in based on the conversation, and can be presented at the right moment.
“As a Gold member, you qualify for a complimentary breakfast if you book today.”
“Book now and we’ll include bike rentals for your family.”
“Since you’re coming with your family, we can upgrade you to a suite for $75/night, already approved by the manager.”
These offers delight travelers, increase conversions, and maintain hotel control. Hotels can choose to automate some offers while routing others for staff approval, balancing personalization with operational oversight.
Illustrative Traveler Journeys
Putting this all together, what could an MCP-powered experience look like for travelers? Here are some scenarios showing how MCP can create a seamless experience.
Family Traveler: A parent planning a summer trip searches for hotels in Barcelona. Through MCP, they confirm adjoining rooms, redeem loyalty points for free nights, and book bike rentals for the kids without ever leaving the AI conversation.
Business Traveler: A frequent flyer checks availability for a downtown Chicago hotel. MCP ensures their elite loyalty status is recognized, surfaces member rates, and offers a same-day room upgrade plus a reserved late night dinner spot at the hotel restaurant.
Luxury Traveler: A couple planning a special anniversary in Granada learns via MCP about a private sunrise tour of the Alhambra gardens available only for direct bookings. This hidden, non-public perk transforms their booking into a richer experience.
Conclusion
Travel planning today is fragmented, frustrating, and high-stakes. Foundational AI simplifies part of the journey by consolidating research and decision-making into a single conversational flow. MCP completes the picture by supplying the real-time, accurate, and personalized data that travelers need to book with confidence.
DirectBooker is building our MCP server to make the booking experience truly seamless. The complexity of connecting hundreds of hotel systems, caching petabytes of ARI data, and serving accurate prices at internet scale isn’t new to us: this team has built it before. We know that travelers want answers in one conversational flow, and hotels want systems that won’t be overwhelmed by speculative queries. By acting as an AI-native, supplier-aligned aggregator, we absorb that complexity.
For the traveler, everything simply works: real-time availability, loyalty perks, special offers, and unique property features surface naturally in their AI conversation.
For hotels, we provide:
Stronger direct booking channels and reduced reliance on costly intermediaries.
Highlighting of loyalty benefits to reinforce brand relationships.
Differentiation through property-specific features.
Monetization of ancillary services within the planning flow.
The ability to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
Foundational AI companies also win because they get to avoid spending time and energy on building feeds and datasets. By focusing on scalable solutions working with MCP partners, and exploring the new capabilities that are unlocked to create transformative experiences across multiple domains. And by working with a supplier-aligned aggregator, they can build an experience far beyond what search offers today.
The result: a travel experience that shifts from stressful and fragmented to conversational, engaging, and inspiring. MCP does more than connect the data. Done right, hotels can differentiate, delight, and drive loyalty. We can use AI to reconnect travelers to the joy of planning, booking, and experiencing their trips with confidence.
Join us! Let’s revolutionize travel. Again.
Richard Holden, Steve Kaufer, Sanjay Vakil
Steve, Richard and Sanjay have combined over 50 years experience in the online travel, hotel search and travel planning as leaders from Tripadvisor, Google Travel and now, DirectBooker.
