This is Part 1 of a four-part series on where agentic booking actually breaks corporate travel: payments, visibility, liability, and the TMC business model itself.
AI agents are starting to book corporate travel on a traveler’s behalf. Amex GBT announced its Egencia connector for Claude in July, with availability in Q3. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol counts Amex, Mastercard, PayPal, and Adyen as collaborators. Mastercard launched Agent Connect on September 9, giving merchants one integration point across AI platforms.
Every booking like that needs an answer to a question most travel programs have never faced. Who authorizes the charge?
Mastercard’s product chief described agents as moving commerce from search and discovery to “checkout and disputes.” Disputes come later in this series. Authorization comes first, and in my experience the answer turns on a payment structure most travel managers have never examined.
Two Payment Models, One Big Difference
In the pass-through model, the supplier is the merchant of record. The traveler pays the hotel or airline directly, and the agency collects a commission after the stay.
In the Merchant of Record (MoR) model, the agency becomes the merchant. It charges the traveler, holds the funds, and pays the supplier. That gives one consolidated ledger instead of a trail scattered across dozens of supplier billing systems.
Pass-through did not dominate by accident. US interchange is largely unregulated and can run past 2% per transaction. Corporate cards are exempt even where consumer cards are capped: in the EU they run between 1.3% and 2.4%, up to six times the consumer rate. Agencies avoided that cost by passing card details straight to the supplier, giving up control over refunds.
That made sense when the difference mattered mostly for reconciliation. In 2026, that difference decides whether your payment infrastructure is ready for an AI agent to transact inside it.
Agentic Booking Needs a Single Point of Authorization
When an agent books a flight or a hotel, it authorizes a payment against a policy: a spend cap, an approved supplier list, a real-time budget check. Google’s AP2 and Mastercard’s Agent Pay handle authorization. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is narrower, verifying agent identity rather than moving money.
Roberto Catanzaro, Chief Business Officer for Merchant Solutions at Nexi, describes payment as the moment an agent’s action gets verified against the buyer’s intent. I think that framing is right, and it explains why the payment layer deserves more attention than the booking interface.
None of it works cleanly if payment is spread across a dozen merchant accounts. An agent authorizing a $400 hotel charge against one merchant and a $600 flight against another faces two fraud rulesets and two dispute processes. Corporate travel is different from retail. One trip touches an airline, a hotel, and often ground transport, separate merchants unless someone consolidates them.
Where That Single Point Comes From
An MoR agency gives you that by design. One merchant, one authorization point, and one ledger. An agent can then verify it against spend caps and policy rules.
It is not the only route. A central travel account consolidates too, and arguably enforces policy harder, because payment sits inside the booking tool and a non-compliant booking cannot pay.
But that assumes the booking passes through the tool. An agent hitting a supplier API directly walks around it. Under MoR, the agency is the merchant no matter how the booking arrives.
You cannot get that from the protocols either. Mastercard built Agent Connect so merchants keep pricing control. Stripe’s shared payment tokens keep the business as merchant of record. The rails preserve supplier-side control by design.
What Decoupled Payment Flows Actually Buy You
Here is what the reconciliation argument misses. When an agency is MoR, money coming in from the client is separate from money going out to suppliers. The pattern, as Adyen describes it, is to collect at booking and pay suppliers with virtual cards, sometimes immediately, sometimes at check-in, sometimes after the stay.
That separation buys flexibility. The agency controls what the traveler pays, when they pay it, and when suppliers get settled. Cancellations and changes resolve on its own platform rather than waiting on each supplier’s refund cycle. WEX notes MoR operators can offer stronger refund protections because they hold the transaction.
That matters more for agents than people. An agent rebooking a disrupted trip cannot call three suppliers; the change has to resolve in one system.
If You’re Still on Pass-Through
Pass-through does not block agentic booking. It means your team builds the authorization and audit-trail layer supplier by supplier rather than inheriting one from your TMC. The effort lands on you, not them.
Why It Matters to You
My read is that the payment model has quietly become one of the more consequential decisions in a corporate travel program. Most procurement teams still treat it as a back-office detail.
At WWStay, we operate as MoR for clients and pay suppliers with virtual cards, so change and cancellation handling sits on our platform rather than each supplier’s. Any MoR agency works on a similar structure.
Travel managers already on an MoR agency have a head start. Everyone else should raise this with their TMC before agent-initiated booking becomes the default.
Next in this series: what happens when a booking looks perfectly compliant but your duty-of-care system never sees it.
Rajeev Goswami is CEO of WWStay and a member of the GBTA Technology Committee.
References
- Mastercard gives merchants a simpler way to build, connect and scale AI-powered shopping experiences — Mastercard
- Amex GBT Launches Business Travel Agent-to-Agent Infrastructure, Debuts Egencia AI Connector in Claude — Amex GBT
- Amex GBT adds agentic commerce to corporate travel — American Banker
- Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) — Google Cloud Blog
- Visa and Ramp Develop AI Agents for Corporate Bill Pay — PYMNTS
- Agentic Commerce Protocol — Stripe Documentation
- Corporate Cards vs. Centralized Billing for Travel — Routespring
- What is the merchant model? — WEX Inc.
- Reinventing money movement in travel — Adyen
- Interchange Fees 101: What They Are And How They Work — Stripe
- Merchants call on EU institutions to cap commercial cards interchange — EuroCommerce
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