Travelxp’s new AI travel agent can plan, book, pay for and manage trips on a traveller’s behalf, moving AI travel from recommendations to real-world action
Travelxp is launching Marco, an AI agent that plans, books and pays for a trip on a traveller's behalf. This makes Travelxp the first Indian travel platform to extend an AI agent into the transaction layer rather than stopping at recommendation. The product was unveiled on 9 September 2026 at Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai and opens to the public on 10 September.
A 2026 IMG study found that 75% of travellers already use AI for trip recommendations, while only 13% carry that through to an actual booking. That gap has defined most AI travel tools to date: systems that can suggest an itinerary but hand the traveller back to separate checkout flows, separate merchants, and a budget that has to be tracked manually across all of them.
What Travelxp is Changing With Marco
A traveller may get a complete itinerary from an AI tool, but still has to move across separate booking pages, merchants and payment flows to actually put the trip together.
Travelxp is using Marco to close that gap. A traveller gives it a destination, an overall budget and a set of preferences, then defines what the agent can do without further approval.
From there, it can search and book across flights, hotels, transfers and activities. It can also complete payments within the limits already set by the traveller. Those limits can include the total amount available to spend, the categories Marco is allowed to transact in, and the actions that still need explicit sign-off.
This allows the agent to manage multiple travel purchases against one trip-level budget. A holiday may involve separate payments to an airline, a hotel, a transfer operator and an activity provider, but Marco keeps those decisions connected instead of treating each purchase as a separate booking flow.
The same system also stays active after the initial bookings are complete. If a flight is delayed, for example, it can assess how that affects the rest of the itinerary and, within the permissions already given, adjust related arrangements such as a hotel check-in time, airport transfer or activity slot.
For the traveller, the interaction is therefore concentrated at the beginning: set the trip requirements, budget and approval boundaries, then allow Marco to carry out the actions that fall within them.
Travelxp is moving first, in a market where global agentic assistants are already handling real transaction volume
The pattern is visible outside India. Poke, a text-based AI assistant, exchanged over 100 million user messages in the three months before its acquisition by Cognition in July 2026. Instinct, a comparable agent, has raised about $350 million in total, including a $250 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation, within months of its 2026 launch. Both have been used in part to handle travel bookings and logistics. No Indian travel platform had brought that model to travel specifically until this launch.
Travelxp is India's first content-led travel commerce platform, built on the premise that travel inspiration and travel booking should sit inside one ecosystem rather than two. This launch extends that ecosystem one step further, from discovery and booking into planning, paying for and adjusting a trip on the traveller's behalf.
Disclosure: Quests.travel and Travelxp.com are part of the same parent media and travel ecosystem. Despite this corporate relationship, Quests.travel maintains strict editorial independence, and this coverage adheres to our standard journalistic guidelines.