Travelport, Booked AI, Basis Theory and Mastercard say they have completed a live airline transaction executed end to end by an AI agent.
The agents autonomously handled the flight search, the booking, the payment and the ticket issuance.
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In this demonstration, the customer stayed inside the conversational interface throughout the process, while the agent never had access to the card number used.
The partners present the operation as one of the first public demonstrations of a real end-to-end airline purchase executed by an AI agent, with tokenised agentic payment, verification of customer consent and actual ticket issuance.
The four partners are Travelport, the global travel technology provider and GDS player; Booked AI, the travel technology company specialising in AI-powered conversational agents; Basis Theory, the independent payments vault and tokenisation provider; and Mastercard, the payments giant.
The airline remains the official merchant of record throughout the transaction
In the process described by the partners, Booked AI captures the traveller’s request in natural language and searches for an existing air offer. That offer, based on the NDC standard, is supplied by Travelport’s Trip Services platform. The customer is then invited, without leaving the interface, to confirm the itinerary and the fare.
From there, Mastercard Agent Pay triggers the payment using a tokenised identifier. The card number is held in Basis Theory’s PCI vault and is not disclosed to the agent. Verifiable Intent, another Mastercard solution, ensures the payment details match the authorisation given by the customer. If the transaction details did not match the approved intent, the payment would have been blocked and a fresh validation would have been required. Booking and ticket issuance are handled by Travelport’s systems and by the airline.
As a result, the airline, whose name is not specified, remained the official merchant of record throughout the transaction, even though the partners do not detail the level of enrolment required for a traveller to trigger this process: the user will likely need to be identified with Booked AI and have a card or payment method compatible with Mastercard Agent Pay.
Even if the user must first identify with one or other of these services, it appears that the commercial relationship is ultimately established between travellers and airlines, hitherto under‑represented in LLM results.
The demonstration aims to show, just as another consortium with complementary strengths (Sabre, Mindtrip and PayPal) sought to do, that an AI agent can execute a real flight booking, and not only recommend a trip.
“Our goal is to replicate, end to end, the experience of a human travel agent: understanding the traveller’s needs and handling everything through to ticket issuance, in a trusted environment,” said Mennan Yelkenci, founder and chief executive of Booked AI.
“This booking is a concrete step in that direction.”