If you build it (the UCP), they (the guests) will come. Kinda.

Google UCP may be the door to a "post booking engine" industry, for both human and non-human bookers. More than a rupture, however, it formalizes a shift that is already underway. UCP, in fact, introduces a shared transactional language that allows AI agents, platforms, merchants, and payment providers to operate inside the same conversational space. Discovery, decision-making, checkout, and even post-purchase actions (such as leaving a review, requesting a change, or seeking support) can all happen within AI interfaces like Google AI Mode or Gemini, without forcing the user to jump between websites or apps.

View by Simone Puorto, Head of Emerging Trends and Strategic Innovation, Hospitality Net

Conceptually, it is a one-stop shop for transactions, closer to the logic of super apps like WeChat than to the traditional Western search engine model.

And, in theory, this solves the oldest and most frustrating problem in hotel distribution: booking itself. Booking a hotel has always meant learning a new interface every time. Different brand sites, different OTAs, different UX patterns, different rules (I have talked about this extensively here).

UCP promises to collapse all of this into a single conversational flow. For retail, this is a no-brainer. For our industry? Kinda...

Let's start by saying that the problem UCP is trying to solve is real, but it is also old. In hospitality, we have tried to solve it before. "Book on Google" was built on the same promise: remove friction and integrate checkout. It never really worked, however, not because the intent was wrong, but because of our f*cked up ARI infrastructure.

IMHO, UCP remains, at least philosophically, pretty much retail-native, if not retail-first (or even retail-only). Its architecture assumes structured offers and relatively stable SKUs. Hospitality products, au contraire, are time-bound, policy-dense, and highly volatile. You know the drill: prices, availability, cancellation rules, room attributes, and inclusions can change (as they should) in seconds.

This is probably why we have never truly had a native e-commerce experience in hospitality. Not because the industry is slow (that's BS), but because our products do not behave like "normal" products. Our inventories are, by nature, (over)complicated.

So the open question is not whether UCP is useful (because it is), but whether a protocol designed to eliminate friction can survive in a domain where inventory is highly schizophrenic.

As usual, "if you build it (the UCP), they (the guests) will come," but we need to make sure we a proper infrastructure behind UCP to make it work.

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