Booking Holdings Brands Working Together to Deploy AI

Booking Holdings’ brands are sharing among themselves what they’ve learned as they develop and implement artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools.

So said Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel during the company’s quarterly earnings call held Thursday (Aug. 3).

“Being able to do all these things from the different brands and being able to learn from each other — what works, what doesn’t work, where should you put more emphasis, where should be put less emphasis — I think will help us have an advantage over many other companies that may not have the scale, the experts and basically the capital to put into what could be a very, very exciting future for us,” Fogel said during the call.

The Booking Holdings portfolio of six primary consumer-facing brands focuses on online travel and related services. They include Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, Kayak and OpenTable.

These brands have several AI-related projects underway, Fogel said during the call. For example, OpenTable and Kayak have added ChatGPT plug-ins. Booking.com has deployed a beta version of an AI Trip Planner. Priceline has a generative AI-powered travel assistant called Penny that can answer travel-related questions. Agoda is using generative AI internally to become more efficient in coding.

OpenTable announced in March that it has partnered with ChatGPT to bring restaurant recommendations to that generative AI-powered chatbot.

Priceline teamed up with Google to offer its AI-powered services, which let customers engage with a generative AI-powered chatbot and will also start delivering more personalized offerings to customers seeking hotels.

Fogel’s comments about AI came during an earnings call in which he said Booking Holdings is working to build out different elements of the “connected trip,” which is the company’s effort to enable customers to book all aspects of their travel experience through its platform.

“In addition to the many current applications for AI on our platforms, we believe that we can build an even more compelling and differentiated offering for our bookers if we can leverage AI technology to deliver a more personalized booking experience,” Fogel said during the call. “A connected trip would be more responsive to a booker’s needs and help manage different aspects of their trips.”