Google Maps adds AI food ordering and hotel booking

Google announced on Thursday that its Ask Maps chatbot inside Google Maps is gaining agentic capabilities that let it complete real-world tasks directly, including ordering food, booking hotels, and finding event tickets, rather than just answering questions about a location.

The update pushes Google Maps further from a pure navigation tool toward an assistant that acts on a user's behalf. Google has spent the past two years layering Gemini-powered chat features onto Maps' 2 billion-plus monthly users, and this release is the first to let the assistant complete a transaction rather than just surface information.

With the new food-ordering flow, a user can type or say something like "Where can I order vegan avocado toast and an oat milk latte near home?" Ask Maps will surface nearby restaurants that carry the items and let the user place the order through supported partner platforms, including Square, Toast, and Uber Eats, without leaving the Maps app.

Hotel booking works similarly: a user describes criteria such as budget, room size, and proximity to a gym or restaurants, and the chatbot compares prices and checks real-time availability before handing off to a booking link. Event ticket search for things like comedy shows and live music is rolling out alongside it.

Google is also adding Personal Intelligence to Ask Maps, a feature that is off by default and, once enabled, lets the assistant pull context from a user's Gmail and Google Calendar to personalize answers. Google's example query is "What time will I land in Vancouver on my upcoming flight?" — a question Ask Maps can now answer by reading a flight confirmation email rather than requiring the user to look it up. The chatbot also gains conversation memory for multi-turn trip planning and a live transit widget for real-time updates.

Food ordering, hotel booking, and event ticket search are rolling out to U.S. users first. Personal Intelligence and the live transit widget are rolling out more broadly, to every market where Ask Maps is available.

The move puts Google Maps in more direct competition with standalone booking and delivery apps, and it mirrors a broader industry push toward "agentic" AI products that complete tasks rather than just retrieve information — a category OpenAI, Perplexity, and Amazon have all been racing to build out through their own assistants. Restaurants and hotels that plug into Ask Maps' partner platforms stand to gain a new discovery channel, while it adds pressure on delivery and travel apps to defend their position as the default checkout point.

As first reported by TechCrunch, Google has not said whether the agentic features will expand to Wear OS or Android Auto, where Ask Maps is also available.