Tourism Website Expedia Measures are being taken.Encourage people to use theAI(AI) capabilities to start their travel searches instead of using external search engines.
Expedia already uses AI in some customer service functions and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels.The company hopes that in the future AI will be able to recommend travel destinations based on users’ previous travel experiences and drive more direct traffic to its website.It’s a long-term plan to change the balance of power on the web — though it’s still in its earliest stages for the company.
The goal is to allow users to start planning their trip in one place, said Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia.Expedia hopes to use its recommendation system trained on its flight and hotel information database and combine it with users' travel preferences to make recommendations.Large Language Models"With the rich 70PB of data we've collected over the years, we can eventually make recommendations about where to go, where to stay, and what to do, and continue to refine and personalize them," he said.Naidu said in an interview.
Naidu pointed out that when people plan a trip, they usually go to a search engine first to find the destination. Then they visit services like Expedia to start booking travel and accommodation. He believes that although typing "not far from New York and not cold" into Google is not very popular,optimalThere’s nothing wrong with “resorts” like this, but he believes there’s value in further streamlining the travel planning process.
The power of AI assistants lies in their applications in areas such as travel. Imagine needing to book a flight and just telling the AI yourFirst choiceThe flight time and airline, the AI will book it for you.Expedia’s proposal sounds like a middle ground: AI won’t be able to book everything for customers yet, but the goal is to let people plan their trips in one place — just like travel agents did before internet bookings..
Of course, Expedia will benefit if people choose not to go to Google first.
Jeff Hurst, former chief financial officer of Expedia, testified in the U.S. antitrust trial against Google thatEven though travel sites have increased the amount they pay Google for advertising, traffic has never increased since the search engine started showing flights and hotels.Specialized search engines — sites that focus on finding information about one thing, like travel or restaurant reviews — have a long and complicated relationship with the search giant. The more Expedia cuts out Google as a middleman, the more revenue it can earn.
While fully personalized travel planning services are not yet available on Expedia, the service has long used machine learning algorithms to track flight prices and find hotels. It launched a virtual assistant tool in March 2020 to help customers with post-booking issues, such as refunds and confirming stay dates, and then A customer service chatbot plugin based on ChatGPT was announced in AprilThe company also operates vacation rental site Vrbo,The site uses AI to help property owners write descriptions of their homes and assess photo quality.
Other travel companies are also investing in AI:Airbnb acquired AI-driven travel planning startup Gameplanner.AI in November.
Expedia Group, Inc. is an online travel company with brands including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Orbitz.com, Travelocity, Trivago, Hotwire.com, Egencia, Venere.com, HomeAway, Expedia Local Experts, and Classic Vacations. Expedia is a NASDAQ-listed company with the ticker symbol EXPE.