What Happened?
Shares of online travel agency Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE)
fell 7.2% in the afternoon session after Barron’s Anita Hamilton wrote that Expedia, Booking Holdings, Tripadvisor, and Airbnb were falling because Muse can book flights and places to stay. Expedia was down 5.5%, to $265.60, by midday Tuesday, she reported. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and William Tong wrote that if agents take 5% to 10% of travel, ride-hailing, and delivery business, the combined revenue loss could exceed $5 billion.
Consumer internet was down 4.92% at Wednesday’s open, and Expedia was weaker than that.
Expedia gets paid when a traveler comes to Expedia to search and book. An agent that does the search and the booking elsewhere is a direct hit to that visit. The 5% to 10% figure is a scenario, not a result. What would confirm it is travelers actually finishing trips inside an agent instead of on Expedia.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks. Is now the time to buy Expedia? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
What Is The Market Telling Us
Expedia’s shares are very volatile and have had 21 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 1 day ago when the stock dropped 4.4% on the news that the rapid adoption of Meta’s new autonomous AI assistant, Muse, sparked concerns over structural disruption to digital marketplaces and digital advertising revenues. Meta’s Muse rose to the top free-app position in U.S. app stores, Business Insider reported, driven by growing consumer interest in personal AI agents capable of researching products, booking travel, and completing forms across external websites. The Wall Street Journal reported that Muse can buy goods online, send emails, and complete other tasks users authorize.
The widespread use of autonomous shopping agents presents substantial risks to traditional e-commerce platforms. By managing product discovery before shoppers directly visit digital storefronts, these tools can bypass standard search listings and undermine lucrative sponsored ads and intermediary commission fees.
In reaction to that shift, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on Amazon.com and asked Meta to remove the marketplace from the experience, a spokesperson told Business Insider. Amazon has also sued Perplexity over automated shopping through its Comet browser and moved to restrict agents from Google and OpenAI, according to Business Insider. That is why lead-generation and marketplace names such as EverQuote, LendingTree, CarGurus, Cars.com, and Instacart, and travel intermediaries such as Expedia and Booking Holdings, traded lower together: their models depend on shoppers still arriving on a site where ads and commissions are charged.
Expedia is down 7.4% since the beginning of the year, and at $262.01 per share, it is trading 22.7% below its 52-week high of $339.13 from August 2026. Despite the year-to-date decline, investors who bought $1,000 worth of Expedia’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $1,570.
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