Answers, before you ask.

VistaLink is an AI-native infrastructure company for hotel search and booking. We index about 650,000 properties — their photography, their guest reviews, and the ground around them — and we hold the hotels’ own direct rates alongside them. Other companies reach all of it through one white-label API, over MCP or REST: search, hotel content to render under their own brand, and a booking that completes on the hotel’s website rather than an OTA’s.

An OTA sells rooms to travellers and keeps 15–25% of each one, and where a hotel lands in its results has a lot to do with what that hotel pays. VistaLink sells rooms to nobody. We are the layer underneath other people’s products — our search, our hotel content and our direct booking, running inside someone else’s app under their brand — and the reservation completes on the hotel’s own website, so the OTA commission never enters the price to begin with.

About 650,000 properties. Whether the ones you need are among them is a fair question, and it’s better answered by looking than by taking a number on trust — run a few searches on the free tier against the markets you actually sell, and see what comes back.

We read the property itself, not its listing. Photographs are analyzed for what the place actually looks like. Reviews are read for what staying there is like, rather than for the score they average out to. And location is treated as what a guest can walk to, not as a pair of coordinates. A query in plain language — “somewhere quiet with a fireplace, walkable to dinner” — is matched against all of it at once, so what comes back answers the sentence. No hotel can buy a better position in the results, because we don’t sell one.

From the hotels, not from a wholesaler. Our pipeline reads each property’s own booking channel — the engine behind the “Book direct” button on its own website — so the price we return is the hotel’s price for those dates. That runs across the index, not for a handful of partner properties. Direct is usually the cheaper side of the market, and a fair amount of it never reaches an OTA at all: member rates, packages, rooms a hotel simply doesn’t hand to distribution. Where our pricing data says a property will go lower still, agents go and ask, and that offer exists nowhere online.

Prices come from snapshots of each property’s booking channel, not from a live availability call, so a rate should be shown with the dates it was quoted for and treated as liable to move before the guest books. That’s the honest limit, and we’d rather state it than have you find it. Content moves more slowly than price. Photography can run behind a refurbishment, which is why the written description and the guest insights are the authoritative account of a property rather than the photo set — and why reviews come with their count, so you can see when a property has too few for the summary to carry much weight.

It books. Headless browsers drive the property’s real reservation page, the same one a guest would use, fill it in and submit it; the hotel’s own confirmation comes back in seconds. Nothing sits in between — no GDS, no OTA, no aggregator holding the reservation. The guest is the hotel’s guest, on the hotel’s own terms, and no OTA commission of 15–25% has been added to what they pay. Where a rate has to be asked for rather than clicked, an agent negotiates it first and the booking follows.

It does, though negotiation is the last step rather than the main one — most rates already come out of the pipeline. When our pricing data suggests a property will go below its own listed price, an agent phones the hotel in the local language, or emails it, and asks. The telephony is ours: WebRTC, full-duplex audio, real turn-taking, with the speech recognition, the model and the voice each swappable underneath. None of it is a wrapper around somebody else’s voice API. What returns is the hotel’s own offer, typically 11–17% under the best price online, with the transcript and the recording attached.

Three kinds of teams, mostly. AI assistants and agent frameworks that need hotel search and booking as tools a model can call. Travel and corporate-travel products that would rather have people type what they mean than set six filters. And hospitality software that needs to put a real booking through without a GDS or an OTA in the way.

Yes. There’s an MCP server at api.vistalink.com/mcp and a REST API at api.vistalink.com, both behind the same Bearer token. Four tools: search_hotels, chat_about_hotels, get_hotel_details and call_hotel. The free tier is 50 requests a month, which is enough to build something real before anyone has to talk to sales.

Hotels list through the Hotel Extranet at extranet.vistalink.com. Listing is free: no setup fee, no subscription, nothing monthly. VistaLink charges 10% only on the completed stays it brings, invoiced at the end of each month — the bookings a hotel already had are never charged, and neither are cancellations or no-shows. Reservations land on the property’s own channel with its own guest data. A hotel does well here by having good photographs and happy guests, which is the one thing it can’t buy from us.

Go to extranet.vistalink.com/list and fill it in. There’s nothing to install and most properties are live in about five minutes, and because listing is free there is nothing to approve or pay for before it goes up. Bookings then arrive on the property’s own booking channel with its own guest data, so how a hotel already takes reservations doesn’t have to change. The Extranet keeps its own FAQ for the questions that come after this one.