TikTok wants to be your travel agent, too—now you can book hotels and tours without leaving the app

TikTok is taking another step toward keeping you inside its app for everything, this time with a new feature called TikTok GO. Starting Tuesday, users 18 and older in the U.S. can discover and book hotels, attractions, and experiences directly through the platform. Instead of watching a video of a resort in Cancún and then hopping over to a booking site, you can now check availability and pay without ever closing the app. The feature pulls up options through videos, search, and location pages, and it’s powered by partnerships with Booking.com, Expedia, Viator, GetYourGuide, Tiqets, and Trip.com. Creators who feature destinations or activities can link their content directly to bookings, earning commissions through campaigns. The move follows the same strategy TikTok used with TikTok Shop, which launched in 2023 and let users buy products from videos. Now travel gets the same treatment. Instead of sending users to outside websites, TikTok wants to be the place where inspiration turns into a transaction. That puts it in more direct competition with Google, especially as younger users already treat TikTok as a search engine for recommendations. The partner-competitor dynamic is worth watching: Booking.com and Expedia are both partners and rivals in the travel space. They provide the inventory TikTok needs, but TikTok is angling to own the customer relationship. “Every day on TikTok, millions of people discover where to eat, where to stay, and what to do next,” said Adam Presser, CEO of TikTok USDS Joint Venture, in a blog post. “TikTok GO connects that moment of inspiration directly to the businesses behind it.” This isn’t TikTok’s first experiment with in-app booking—it partnered with Ticketmaster in 2022 for event tickets—but it’s by far the most ambitious.