Citi Wants AI Agent Companies Liable When Their Bots Botch Travel Bookings

A Visa study of more than 75 AI booking agents found 43% of them made mistakes, and roughly half of those went ahead and completed the wrong purchase anyway. That error rate, cited by Citi executive Abhinav Anand at the Skift Commerce Summit in New York, is the backdrop for one of the sharpest fights in travel payments right now: who pays when an agent books the wrong trip.

Citi's answer is the company behind the agent. "Who takes the agent liability" is the biggest question banks, payment networks, merchants and AI companies are trying to answer, said Anand, Citi's head of value cards, lending and commerce for U.S. consumer cards. In Citi's view, he said, liability should fall "to the agent themselves, the company that is actually coming with the agent" — not the hotel, airline or card issuer.

How would the networks enforce it?

One mechanism Anand floated: agents that want to transact on Visa or Mastercard might have to accept some liability when they register with the networks. That's a distribution-level lever, and it matters for anyone selling travel through or alongside these agents. If networks make liability a condition of access, agent companies would effectively underwrite their own error rates.

Even the best performers aren't clean. Anand said top agents — which he said included Google's Gemini and Meta's Muse — get it right only about 82% of the time. Put plainly: the leading bots still get roughly one booking in five wrong, and chargeback rates on agent transactions will run above average in the short term, he acknowledged.

Can disputes be settled by proving intent?

To resolve arguments over what the traveler actually asked for, Anand said the industry is working to carry the traveler's purchase instructions inside the tokenized transaction. Issuers and merchants could then see the original intent when a charge is disputed — a paper trail embedded in the payment itself. That's a proposal, not a live standard; nobody has shipped it at scale.

Why Citi is leaning in anyway

The commercial case is straightforward. Early industry data Anand cited show travelers arriving through agent-led search and discovery convert 40% to 50% higher and spend more per transaction. For a card issuer, that's revenue per booking, not just volume.

Citi isn't watching from the sidelines. It was among the first issuers enabled for agentic payments with Mastercard, and more recently with Visa. It's also building an AI-enabled travel concierge inside its own app — a play to keep the transaction, and presumably the interchange, in-house. There's a limit, though: third-party agents can't use Citi ThankYou points today, which fences off the issuer's loyalty currency from outside bots for now.

The open question is cost. If agent companies do absorb liability, they'll likely price it into how — and how fast — they transact, and that could slow adoption. For travel sellers, the next signal to watch is whether Visa and Mastercard actually write liability into agent registration rules.