Travel ChatGPT Plugins
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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Travel
Travel ChatGPT plugins were the subset of third party plugins in the ChatGPT Plugins store, live between March 2023 and April 2024, that handled flight search, hotel booking, car rental, ground transport, tours and attractions, and end to end trip planning. They are deprecated: OpenAI shut the entire plugin program down, blocking new plugin conversations after March 19, 2024 and ending all existing plugin conversations on April 9, 2024 [1][17][19]. Travel was the most visible category at launch because two of the twelve inaugural third party partners, Expedia and KAYAK, were travel companies named in OpenAI's March 23, 2023 announcement [1][2][3]. The function lives on through the successor stack of Custom GPTs, the GPT Store, GPT Actions, and later the Model Context Protocol. This article is a historical record of the period during which a large language model could call live travel inventory through an open plugin contract.
A travel ChatGPT plugin was server software that exposed a web API to ChatGPT, letting the chatbot fetch real time travel inventory from a partner such as Expedia or KAYAK and return ranked flights, hotels, cars, or activities inside a conversation. OpenAI described plugins generally as tools that help ChatGPT "access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services" [1]. Travel was the headline use case: OpenAI's own example prompt in the launch post was "Use Expedia to plan my NYC trip" [1].
Like every plugin, a travel plugin consisted of two artefacts on the developer's domain: a manifest file named ai-plugin.json served at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json, and an OpenAPI specification describing the endpoints. ChatGPT used the manifest to describe the plugin to the GPT-4 model in natural language and used the OpenAPI document to plan and validate calls. The travel category did not require any special framework beyond this contract.
Practical capabilities clustered into a small number of patterns: flight search by airports, dates, airline, stops, cabin class, and price ceiling; hotel and short term rental search; car rental and peer to peer car sharing; activities and attraction tickets by destination and theme; multimodal ground transport across trains, buses, ferries, and flights; destination discovery driven by a budget or by interests; and itinerary assembly that stitched flights, hotels, cars, and activities into a multi day plan. The Wolfram plugin, one of the twelve launch partners, was also useful for travel adjacent computation such as distances, time zone differences, and currency math [1][20].
Almost no travel plugin completed a transaction inside ChatGPT itself. The standard pattern was to return a deep link to a populated checkout or search results page on the partner's own site, which the user opened in a browser to confirm prices, log in, and book. This boundary was deliberate: ChatGPT could compose, search, and rank, but the actual purchase happened on the partner site, where existing payment, identity, fare rules, and trust mechanisms already lived. As PhocusWire and Skift noted at launch, the plugins changed the front of the funnel, not the booking engines [2][3].
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023 in a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins" [1]. The launch slate listed twelve third party partners alongside two first party plugins (a Browsing tool and a Code Interpreter sandbox) and an open source Retrieval Plugin reference implementation [1][20]. The twelve external partners were Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier; Computerworld summarised the slate as "a dozen application plug-ins" [1][20]. Two of those twelve were travel companies: Expedia and KAYAK. Both shipped their plugins simultaneously with the announcement and were featured in the demo videos. Coverage from PhocusWire and Skift on the same day described them as the first travel companies to integrate with ChatGPT [2][3].
Access at launch was gated behind a waitlist for ChatGPT Plus subscribers and a subset of developers. On May 12, 2023 OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and the plugin store opened broadly on May 19, 2023 [7]. From late May through the rest of 2023, the travel category grew from two launch partners to a much larger set covering activities, ground transport, alternative accommodation, and regional booking platforms. New entrants included Turo for peer to peer car rental, GetYourGuide for tours and attractions, and several aggregators announced at Microsoft Build 2023, where Microsoft confirmed that Tripadvisor, Trip.com, Skyscanner, Fareportal, and Spotnana were building plugins on the same OpenAPI based contract [8].
The key dates for the travel category are summarised in the table below.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces plugins. Expedia and KAYAK are among the twelve inaugural third party partners. |
| April 4, 2023 | Expedia announces a ChatGPT powered trip planner inside the Expedia iOS app. |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces general availability of plugins for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store opens to all Plus subscribers. |
| May 23, 2023 | Microsoft Build confirms travel plugins from Tripadvisor, Trip.com, Skyscanner, Fareportal, and Spotnana. |
| May 25, 2023 | GetYourGuide launches a plugin covering 75,000 tours and activities. |
| May 2023 | Turo launches the first car sharing plugin, surfacing more than 320,000 vehicles. |
| August 3, 2023 | Omio launches the first ground transport plugin across 47 countries. |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces Custom GPTs and Actions. |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens. |
| February 23, 2024 | OpenAI publishes "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta." |
| March 19, 2024 | New plugin installs and new plugin conversations are disabled. |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stop working; the plugin store and runtime are turned off. |
The plugin program, and with it the entire travel category, was deprecated in 2024. Deprecation arrived in two stages. At OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023 the company introduced Custom GPTs and signalled that plugins would eventually be retired in favour of GPTs and their tool calling layer, called Actions [15]. On February 23, 2024 OpenAI published a help center notice titled "Winding down the ChatGPT plugins beta" [17][19]. The shutdown then happened in product: as Zapier relayed in its own sunset notice, "Beginning March 19, 2024, you won't be able to start any new conversations" with a plugin, and existing plugin conversations "will stop working on April 9, 2024" [19].
OpenAI's stated rationale was that GPTs had superseded plugins. In the deprecation notice the company said it was "winding down the plugins beta on April 9, as GPTs offer a better way to reach ChatGPT users" [17]. At the time of deprecation the plugin store held a little more than 1,000 plugins [17].
OpenAI's public reasons for ending the program all applied to the travel category. Discovery was a problem with more than 1,000 plugins in the store: users had to choose between KAYAK, Expedia, Skyscanner, and Trip.com for a single flight query. The three plugin per conversation limit forced a trip planning session to pick between flights, hotel, and activities and leave out weather or calendar. Reliability varied: Skift's August 17, 2023 review titled "We Tried the Travel Plugins on ChatGPT Plus" reported a mixed experience across Expedia, KAYAK, Skyscanner, Omio, and GetYourGuide [14]. Booking always finished on the partner site, so ChatGPT could not hold a fare, lock a price, or confirm a reservation. The plugin contract exposed only API endpoints with no instructions, knowledge files, or persistent identity, so a user looking for a "Europe trip planner" wanted a branded assistant rather than a raw API. The program also offered no revenue share for developers, which the successor program addressed.
Three workflow patterns dominated discussion of the travel category. The first was conversational trip planning, the canonical Expedia and KAYAK style flow used in OpenAI's launch demos: the user described a trip in free form, ChatGPT (sometimes guided by prompt engineering such as "travelling with a partner and a five year old, prefer direct flights") returned a sketch itinerary, the plugin filled it with a ranked list, and the user clicked through to the partner site.
The second pattern was budget aware destination discovery. The user supplied an origin airport and a budget, often with rough date flexibility, and the plugin returned destinations and flight prices. KAYAK was most cited for this pattern. Its own announcement gave the example query "Where can I fly to from NYC for under $500 in April" and said ChatGPT would "understand the traveler's specific needs and preferences and ask KAYAK to provide tailored recommendations based on that information" [6]. Expedia, Skyscanner, and Trip.com supported similar queries.
The third pattern, enabled by Omio, was multimodal route comparison across trains, buses, flights, and ferries. A user planning Berlin to Paris could ask for the fastest option across modes and receive a side by side answer mixing a one and a half hour flight with a seven hour train [12]. This was useful in Europe and parts of Asia where rail and bus competed directly with short haul flights.
The two best documented travel plugins are the launch partners that OpenAI named in its original March 23, 2023 announcement, with several later entrants also well covered in the trade press.
Expedia was one of the twelve external launch partners on March 23, 2023 and the most prominent travel name in OpenAI's announcement post [1]. The plugin let a ChatGPT user start an open ended conversation about a trip and pull live results from Expedia Group inventory across flights, accommodation, Vrbo vacation rentals, car rentals, and activities. ChatGPT returned a sketch itinerary, called the plugin for concrete options, and surfaced ranked flight, hotel, and activity results; the user clicked through to Expedia.com to confirm prices and complete the booking. On April 4, 2023 Expedia announced a separate ChatGPT powered trip planner inside the Expedia iOS app [4][5]. The two products coexisted: the plugin lived inside ChatGPT, the in app experience lived inside the Expedia app, and both used Expedia inventory.
KAYAK was the second travel launch partner. The plugin let users describe a trip in natural language and pull KAYAK metasearch results across flights, hotels, and rental cars. KAYAK framed the integration as a conversational front end to its search engine: "ChatGPT will act as a virtual travel assistant, allowing for more conversational interactions with KAYAK's search engine" [6]. The company leaned on two features that suited a conversational interface: budget aware destination discovery, where a user could ask "where can I fly for under 500 dollars from Boston in March" without naming a destination, and flexible date search, which returned the cheapest week to travel rather than a single fixed date. KAYAK opened its announcement with the line "the robots aren't yet ready to take over the world... but they are ready to help people search for travel in a new way" [6]. Because KAYAK is a metasearch engine, the booking itself happened on a third party airline or hotel site rather than on KAYAK.
Turo launched a ChatGPT plugin in May 2023 and was identified in trade press as the first car sharing or peer to peer car rental company to ship one [10][11]. The plugin surfaced Turo's inventory of more than 320,000 active vehicles across more than 1,400 makes and models. Booking continued on Turo.com.
GetYourGuide launched its plugin on May 25, 2023, joining KAYAK and Expedia as the third major travel name with a live integration [9]. The plugin covered the GetYourGuide catalogue of more than 75,000 tours and activities, including guided tours, culinary excursions, classes, skip the line tickets, and bucket list experiences. It was one of the first plugins to address the post booking phase of a trip, where a traveller already had flights and hotels and was looking for things to do in destination.
Omio launched a ChatGPT plugin on August 3, 2023, introducing multimodal ground transport into the travel category [12][13]. The plugin let users compare trains, buses, ferries, and flights between two cities through a conversational interface, connecting to more than 1,000 transport providers across 47 countries. It was the only plugin in the launch window that treated trains and buses as first class travel options alongside flights.
At Microsoft Build 2023 in late May 2023, Microsoft confirmed that additional travel brands were building plugins on the same standard, including Tripadvisor, Trip.com, Skyscanner, Fareportal, and Spotnana [8]. Skyscanner's plugin became available later in 2023 and presented flight results in three categories called Fastest, Cheapest, and Best, derived from the Skyscanner Travel API. Trip.com's plugin offered itinerary planning across hotels and flights and was particularly relevant for trips originating in Asia. Klook, focused on activities and attractions in Asian markets, launched a plugin during the same window covering tours, transfers, and attraction tickets in destinations such as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand.
After general availability on May 19, 2023, independent developers published a long tail of travel plugins covering hotel review aggregation, weather and packing assistants, currency conversion, visa lookups, and itinerary export to calendar. Because this wiki only documents plugins that can be cross referenced to a primary source, the article does not enumerate them by name. Most were short lived and shut down or migrated to GPT Actions after April 2024.
The successor is the combination of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store, introduced at DevDay on November 6, 2023 with the GPT Store opening on January 10, 2024 [15][16]. A GPT bundles custom instructions, optional knowledge files, and Actions (the new name for the plugin style API layer). Where the plugin store presented several single purpose travel plugins, the GPT Store presented a smaller number of branded assistants that combined those calls behind one conversational identity. KAYAK, Expedia, and other former partners shipped GPTs after deprecation. The Actions layer uses the same OpenAPI format plugins used, so most travel developers ported their backends to Actions inside a Custom GPT with limited code changes. A user no longer chose individual plugins inside a chat; the user opened a single GPT and the relevant Actions ran automatically.
The broader industry successor to the plugin contract is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external tools and data that generalises the same idea of a model calling a typed external service. Travel and other vertical integrations built for plugins map naturally onto MCP servers.
The table contrasts the travel category before and after the transition.
| Aspect | Plugin era (2023 to 2024) | GPT era (2024 onward) |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Flat plugin store inside ChatGPT | Branded GPTs in the GPT Store |
| Activation | User toggled up to three plugins per chat | User opened a single GPT |
| Backend contract | OpenAPI plus ai-plugin.json manifest | OpenAPI plus a GPT configuration |
| Persistence of identity | None. Plugins were stateless API wrappers | GPTs carry instructions and knowledge across sessions |
| Revenue model | None for developers | Revenue share announced for GPT Store |
| Booking hand off | Deep link to partner site | Deep link to partner site (unchanged) |
| Migration cost for developers | n/a | Generally low, since the same OpenAPI contract carries over |
For about one year, you could ask ChatGPT to plan a trip and it would phone a real travel company, like Expedia or KAYAK, to get live flights and hotels and show them to you right in the chat. You still finished the booking on the company's own website by clicking a link. OpenAI turned this feature off in April 2024 and replaced it with Custom GPTs, which are like little branded chat helpers that can do the same kind of thing.