Skift hold

Glenn Fogel acknowledges that generative AI is still young – and full of bugs – but he doesn’t have the time to experiment like today.

Justin Dawes

Booking Holdings has many AI experiments in the pipeline.

The travel giant’s five consumer brands – Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, Agoda and OpenTable – now have various consumer or internal tools powered by generative AI. This means the company can test multiple tools to see which one works best.

Glenn Fogel, president and CEO of Booking Holdings, outlined the brand’s AI plans and shared updates during a call to investors last week.

“We know that we are still in the very early days of GenAI and that we have a lot more to learn about consumers, about how they ultimately want to interact with this new technology,” Fogel said on the call.

“Over time, as we further integrate this technology, we hope to see benefits in travel and partner acquisition, retention and satisfaction. Additionally, we hope this will improve operational efficiencies, which will contribute to a slowdown in the growth of our fixed expenses in the future. »

Reservation.com

Booking.com released the first version of its AI travel planner in June 2023, which Fogel said had millions of customer interactions that led to new applications of generative AI. He said this still represents a very small proportion of the brand’s engagement with customers.

The app’s travel planner last week I got an update which allows users to ask questions specific to the chatbot property. And the property search results page has a tool that allows users to automatically check amenity filters using natural language, intended to remove the need for manual filtering.

Fogel said the company is also working on some tools for hotel customers. This includes a tool for hotels to help establishments write responses to traveler inquiries, which he says has led to an increase in response rate. Booking.com is testing a chatbot to help new customers, starting with short-term rentals, answer questions during the onboarding process and speed up registrations.

The company is also working to integrate generative AI into its customer service operations.

“Initial testing shows significant improvements in topic detection in the Booking.com Customer Help Center as well as case summarization for customer service agents. Booking.com is still at the beginning of this journey and sees significant opportunities to improve customer service and increase efficiency by leveraging AI in the future,” Fogel said.

Price line

Last month Priceline was the first travel agency to launch a voicebot based on OpenAI’s latest voice technology.

The Connecticut-based online travel agency first release the AI ​​chatbot Penny in June 2023. It became Penny Voice with the update, capable of engaging in verbal conversations with travelers to help them search for hotels and manage reservations.

“As Priceline continues to improve this offering, we envision Penny being able to anticipate needs based on preferences and past interactions and then respond to them by voice in real time. While great progress has been made in the development of Penny over the last year, Priceline is focused on continually improving Penny over time by leveraging their valuable learnings thus far,” said Fogel.

Agoda

Fogel said 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 leads 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 is skeptical about the use of generative AI in travel planning tools.

OpenTable

OpenTable, the San Francisco-based restaurant reservation app, in September adding an AI voicebot intended to help restaurant customers answer their phones.

The voicebot is able to take calls from restaurant customers to take and manage reservations, answer questions and note dietary restrictions, then automatically save the information into the OpenTable reservation.

The voicebot comes from startup PolyAI, which raised $50 million in May.

OpenTable also announced a partnership with Salesforce in September. Its Agentforce platform is intended to help OpenTable agents automate certain customer service requests. The platform handles routine tasks like booking changes and redeeming loyalty points, intended to help agents focus on more complex situations.

Kayak

Kayaking in March launched Ask Kayakan AI-powered travel planning tool that the company is still testing.

At the same time, the Connecticut-based metasearch engine also launched a tool called PriceCheck. This is a price comparison tool that allows travelers to upload a screenshot of a flight itinerary, which Kayak then checks on many different sites to determine if there is a better price available.

Kayak Chief Scientist Matthias Keller earlier this year discussed several other ways the company is using AI. This includes several experiments to improve internal productivity. And Kayak has a connection with Microsoft Copilot, allowing users of the Bing search engine to get real-time flight information from Kayak in AI-generated results.