Skift got an inside look at how Airbnb's month-old car rental tie-up with CarTrawler works, per a source. The Airbnb-CarTrawler partnership is doing several hundred bookings per day in five markets, reports Executive Editor Dennis Schaal, with those bookings trending toward lower-end rentals. And CarTrawler receives valuable data to convert the customer and market to them in the future.

One question for Airbnb and other OTAs: Would it be more valuable to establish direct relationships with the car-rental companies themselves?

Airbnb's car-rental experiment poses a question every OTA is now facing: own the customer relationship, or route the booking through a partner who converts them later.

Brian Chesky and Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi take the stage on who controls the travel journey, joined by the CEOs of Booking Holdings and Expedia.

CAPITAL ONE TRAVEL + SKIFT

Credit card travel programs are moving beyond points, using curation, access, and benefits to shape where premium travelers stay.

You can now open Google Maps, describe the hotel you want in plain language, and get real availability and pricing back in the same conversation.

In this clip from Good Morning Hospitality, A Skift Podcast: Hotels Edition, Sarah Dandashy and Steve Turk break down what Google's new agentic AI feature inside Maps actually does, what happened when Steve tested it live, asking for the best hotel in Miami Beach, and why this is a bigger threat to OTAs than most people are treating it as right now.

How are public travel companies performing around the world? The Skift Travel 200 pulls the data you need to understand global market movements. Paid subscribers get full access here.

See more essential travel news in your search results.