Skift Take
Glenn Fogel recognizes that generative AI is still young — and full of bugs — but there’s no time to experiment like the present.
Booking Holdings has a lot of AI experiments in the works.
All five of the travel giant’s consumer brands — Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, Agoda, and OpenTable — now have various consumer or internal tools powered by generative AI. That means the company can test multiple tools to see which work best.
Glenn Fogel, president and CEO of Booking Holdings, outlined the brand’s AI projects and shared updates during a call with investors last week.
“We know we are still in the very early days of GenAI and we have much more to learn about consumers, how they ultimately want to interact with this new technology,” Fogel said during the call.
“Over time, as we further incorporate this technology, we expect to see benefits in travel and partner acquisition, retention and satisfaction. In addition, we expect it to improve operational efficiency, which will contribute to a deceleration of our fixed expense growth in the future.”
Booking.com
Booking.com released the first version of its AI trip planner in June 2023, which Fogel said has had millions of interactions with customers that are leading to new applications of generative AI. He said that’s still a very small proportion of the brand’s engagement with customers.
The app’s trip planner last week got an update that allows users to ask the chatbot property-specific questions. And the property search results page got a tool that allows users to automatically check amenity filters using natural language, meant to remove the need for manual filtering.
Fogel said the company is working on some tools for hotel clients, as well. That includes a hotel-facing tool to help properties write responses to inquiries from travelers, which he said has led to an increase in response rate. Booking.com is testing a chatbot to help new clients, starting with short-term rentals, answer questions during the onboarding process and accelerate sign-ups.
The company is also working to incorporate generative AI into its customer service operations.
“Initial testing shows meaningful improvements in topic detection in Booking.com’s customer help center as well as customer service agent case summarization. Booking.com is still early in this journey and sees meaningful opportunities in improving customer service and driving greater efficiency by leveraging AI in the future,” Fogel said.
Priceline
Priceline last month was the first travel company to release a voicebot based on the newest voice tech from OpenAI.
The Connecticut-based online travel agency first released the AI chatbot Penny in June 2023. It became Penny Voice with the update, able to engage in verbal conversations with travelers to help with hotel search and managing bookings.
“As Priceline continues to enhance this offering, we envision that Penny will be able to anticipate needs based on preferences and past interaction and then respond in a real-time voice. While there has been great progress in the development of Penny over the last year, Priceline is focused on further enhancing Penny over time by leveraging their valuable learnings so far,” Fogel said.
Agoda
Fogel said that generative AI has been implemented for more than 120 uses across customer service, software development, content generation, product, finance and human resources at Agoda.
He said the Singapore-based online travel agency is focused on using generative AI to automate product development.
“This is leading to an increase in the share of code written by AI as well as measurable improvements in productivity per developer and development time,” he said.
Agoda CEO Omri Morgenshtern has said in the past that he’s skeptical about the use of generative AI in trip-planning tools.
OpenTable
OpenTable, the San Francisco-based restaurant reservation app, in September added an AI voicebot meant to help client restaurants answer their phones.
The voicebot is able to take calls from restaurant guests to take and manage reservations, answer questions, and note dietary restrictions, then automatically saving the information to the OpenTable reservation.
The voicebot comes from the startup PolyAI, which raised $50 million in May.
OpenTable also in September announced a partnership with Salesforce. Its Agentforce platform is meant to help OpenTable agents automate certain customer service requests. The platform handles routine tasks like reservation changes and loyalty point redemptions, meant to help agents focus on more complex situations.
Kayak
Kayak in March launched Ask Kayak, an AI trip planning tool that the company is still piloting.
At the same time, the Connecticut-based metasearch engine also launched a tool called PriceCheck. It’s a price comparison tool that allows travelers to upload a screenshot of a flight itinerary, which Kayak then checks against many different sites to determine if there is a better price available.
Kayak Chief Scientist Matthias Keller earlier this year discussed several other ways that the company is using AI. That includes multiple experiments for improving internal productivity. And Kayak has a connection with Microsoft Copilot, allowing users of the Bing search engine users to get real-time flight information from Kayak within AI-generated results.
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