Travala launches AI agent hotel booking with USDC on Base

Singapore-based crypto travel platform Travala has launched a protocol that lets artificial intelligence agents search, reserve and pay for hotels using USDC ($USDC) on Coinbase's layer-2 network Base. The system, called Travala Travel MCP, is live through Claude Desktop and is being made available to outside developers for integration into their own travel agents, the company said in a statement.

The protocol connects Travala's hotel inventory to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for linking AI applications to external tools. Payments run over Coinbase's x402 protocol on Base, which Travala said enables gasless $USDC transactions, near-instant settlement and per-booking transaction costs of about $0.01. The launch follows a Cointelegraph report that x402-linked wallets on Base had surpassed 100 million transactions, and arrives alongside AI-focused stablecoin payment products from Fireblocks, MoonPay, Exodus and Oobit.

Despite the agentic framing, final payment authorization still requires manual approval from the traveler, leaving the system short of full autonomy. Travala said the protocol uses ERC-7715 session keys, allowing the AI agent to request a payment while keeping final signing authority inside the user's wallet, and that it can maintain context across searches, bookings and cancellations in a single chat thread. The company is offering developers a 10% Coinbase Wrapped BTC ($cbBTC) rebate on completed stays booked through its agents.

"The launch of the world's first agentic AI travel protocol marks the death of the checkout button," Travala CEO Juan Otero said, describing it as the start of "a truly autonomous travel economy." The protocol currently covers more than 2.2 million hotels, including listings from Marriott, Hilton and IHG sourced through aggregator partners, with plans to extend to flights and other travel products. Travala said its AVA ($AVA) loyalty token is expected to support future Travel MCP use cases.

Founded in 2017, Travala accepts more than 100 cryptocurrencies alongside fiat currencies and competes with crypto-friendly travel platforms such as Sleap.io and Alternative Airlines, though the new protocol positions it more directly against AI-agent booking infrastructure providers. The rollout follows Coinbase-backed x402's recent addition of batch settlement for AI agent payments.