Expedia wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) to knock Google out of the travel planning business.
Travel platform Expedia is seeking to guide users to start identifying their travel plans through its own artificial intelligence, rather than using external search engines.
The company is already leveraging AI for some customer service functions and to help homeowners and hoteliers describe their accommodations. In the future, the company hopes AI will help recommend travel destinations to customers based on their past trips and drive more direct traffic to its website. While this effort is a long-term plan to shift power to the web, it is still in the early stages of development.
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Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and chief data officer at Expedia, explains that the goal is to guide users to start their travel plans from a central location. Expedia aims to create recommendations that are trained on its library of flight and hotel information, taking into account users’ travel preferences. Naidu believes that by training large language models on the company’s data, it will be possible to recommend places to stay and things to do, constantly adapting and evolving those recommendations.
According to Naidu, when people plan trips, they typically start by searching for a destination through search engines. Then, they visit services like Expedia to book travel and accommodations. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using a search engine like Google to find a destination, Naidu believes there’s value in making the trip planning process even simpler. Ultimately, Expedia’s proposal seems to be a middle ground: AI can’t yet fully take over the booking role for customers, but the goal is to get people to plan their trips in a central location, similar to how travel agents did before the age of online booking.
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Expedia’s former CFO, Jeff Hurst, testified in the US v. Google antitrust case that despite Expedia’s increased payments to Google for advertising space, there was no increase in traffic after flights and hotels appeared on the search engine. Vertical engines , sites that specialize in finding information on a specific topic like travel or restaurant reviews, have a long and complex relationship with the search giant. As Expedia reduces its middleman role with Google, it is reaping greater revenue. During a recent vacation, when I revealed that I started my search on Google before turning to Expedia for hotels, Rajesh Naidu joked that I gave my money to Google first rather than Expedia. (I didn’t end up booking through Expedia, after all.)
While Expedia’s personalized travel planning isn’t fully available yet, the service has long used machine learning algorithms to track flight prices and find hotels. It also introduced a virtual assistant tool in March 2020 for post-booking questions like refunds and confirming stay dates. Then, in April, it announced a customer service chatbot powered by ChatGPT. It also operates the vacation rental site Vrbo, which uses AI to write descriptions of owners’ homes and rate the quality of photos.
Other travel companies have also invested in AI – Airbnb bought AI-powered startup Gameplanner.AI in November.
Source of information: https://www.theverge.com
