E03: Google's Newest Travel Plays

Google's I/O event landed with a wall of announcements, but two moves stand out for travel: the Universal Cart and the quietly-released WebMCP. Together they sketch out Google's strategy for owning the agentic booking journey without becoming an OTA themselves and keeping their best advertisers happy. - Google's Universal Cart: a persistent AI-powered shopping hub across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, now expanding to hotel bookings - AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol): Google's infrastructure for letting AI agents complete purchases within user-defined limits - Booking Holdings and Expedia as named agentic travel partners and what the OTA role looks like inside Google's orchestration layer - WebMCP: the Chrome-native protocol that gives AI agents a clean interface to interact with websites, and why it's flying under the radar - What 'agent-readable' actually means for your booking engine, and why being on the field doesn't guarantee you get to play