Travala launches AI travel booking protocol on Base with gasless USDC payments

Travala unveiled Travala Travel MCP, an agentic AI travel protocol built on Base Layer 2 that is designed to let autonomous software agents handle hotel searches, reservations and payment settlement with no human involvement until the final approval. The company said the system uses the x402 open payments standard so APIs, apps and AI agents can send instant stablecoin payments over the internet without manual checkout, while gasless USDC transactions on Base cut booking friction with near-instant settlement and transaction costs of about $0.01 per booking. Travala said the technology already powers an AI travel concierge inside Claude that can plan and execute complete trips in a single chat thread, keeping context across searches, bookings and cancellations. It said ERC-7715 session keys (temporary permissions for transactions) help verify that payment requests come from the agent while final signing authority stays in the user’s secure wallet, and ERC-8004 adds a machine-verifiable trust layer for performance tracking. Future updates are expected to extend the protocol to other travel categories including flights, while AVA will remain the native asset in Travala’s loyalty framework. To encourage adoption, the company is offering a 10% rebate in cbBTC to developers who build and integrate AI agents with the protocol. Founded in 2017 and backed by Binance, Travala says it offers access to more than 2.2 million properties across 230 countries and accepts more than 100 cryptocurrencies alongside traditional payment methods.