Mirai has launched the first ChatGPT plugins that complete bookings on a hotel's direct channel, going live with four Spanish operators: the Emperador and Moderno hotels in Madrid, the Porcel Hoteles chain in Granada and Gloria Thalasso & Hotels in the Canary Islands.

The rollout is deliberately small. But it marks a structural shift: users can now check availability and prices for specific dates and occupancy, switch currencies, apply promotions, complete a booking, and modify or cancel an existing reservation entirely in natural language inside ChatGPT, without leaving the conversation or being redirected to a website.

What do the plugins actually do?

A plugin lets ChatGPT access external services and act on the user's behalf. Mirai's version does not replicate the hotel's website inside the chat. Instead, it exposes the full transactional capability of the booking engine:

• Real-time availability and pricing by date and occupancy
• Currency switching and filtering
• Promotions and room exploration
• Booking completion, modification and cancellation

Mirai frames this as the decisive difference from existing hotel plugins, which tend to copy a visual interface into ChatGPT and bounce users to the website as soon as they try to transact. In Mirai's model, a user can write: "I want to go to Madrid next weekend with my wife and two children, with breakfast and a cancellable rate" — and the assistant interprets the request and works through the direct channel until the booking is done. Voice interfaces sharpen the point: when the screen disappears, what remains is the hotel's ability to understand a natural-language request and act on it.

Which infrastructure sits behind it?

The plugins run on an architecture Mirai has been building for some time. The company's AI infrastructure centralises each hotel's knowledge and, through MCP (Model Context Protocol), exposes both that knowledge and the direct channel's transactional capabilities. It is the same layer that already powers Sarai, Mirai's AI assistant and conversational booking engine, and its other conversational channels. The plugin is only the gateway into ChatGPT; Mirai's infrastructure and the direct channel's capabilities do the work.

OpenAI recently reorganised its ecosystem and replaced the term Apps with plugins, which is now the correct terminology.

Why is Mirai keeping the rollout limited?

Mirai calls this an early and deliberately limited phase, and it names the open questions itself. Discovery comes first: the company does not think it reasonable that travellers would have to know about and install plugins for hundreds of hotels in advance. It is also unclear whether plugins will operate only in the lower funnel or also in the inspiration and recommendation phases. For that reason, Mirai does not expect plugins to become high-volume channels immediately — their current value lies in experimenting, learning and preparing the direct channel.

What does this mean for operators?

The competitive frame is agent-driven distribution. OTAs, in Mirai's assessment, are already preparing to compete in this new ecosystem, and the direct channel must do the same. The challenge for hotels has moved beyond discoverability by AI: the direct channel must also be operable by it. An agent needs to understand the hotel, check availability and prices, and complete the reservation. Being discoverable puts the hotel in the conversation; being operable lets it compete for the booking.

Mirai intends to expand the capability gradually, but deployments will stay limited in this initial stage until the company gathers more relevant insights from the early phase.