Instinct says travel drives more than half of its transactions

The pitch is speed

Shinn contrasted booking travel through Instinct with traditional services that bring together offers from hotel chains, airlines and other providers, show them to users and let them book directly. His argument is that an AI interface could make time-sensitive requests easier to handle.

The company’s restaurant ambitions have proved more contentious. Shinn described a system in which an AI agent checks restaurant websites every five seconds and alerts the user when a time becomes available. He also suggested Instinct wants to rethink reservations and give its users an edge.

His framing drew objections. Some observers warned that agents could invent anniversaries or other special occasions to secure bookings. They also argued that restaurants may prefer regular local customers, who return and bring in more business.

The advantage has a cost

The tension is not just whether an agent can find a table. It is whether the restaurant’s booking system should reward whoever can check most often, or give priority to people the restaurant already knows.

Shinn’s account casts diners as people celebrating important moments and restaurants as places that want interesting guests and special occasions. He set those visitors against locals who, in his description, regularly take a table without celebrating anything in particular. That distinction may help explain the product’s appeal, but it also makes the fairness concern harder to dismiss.

I think the unanswered question is what Instinct’s advantage means in practice: does it simply make a booking easier to find, or does it change who gets access to the table? The source offers no detail on how the company would handle that trade-off.

Instinct recently raised $1 billion in a Series C at a $10 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue participating. The startup has 14 employees and competes in personal AI agents with Meta’s Muse and Khosla Ventures-backed Wajo. That scale makes the reservation debate more than a hypothetical product question: the company is well-funded, but its promise of better access depends on how other people’s scarce capacity is allocated.