SINGAPORE, 30 June 2023: Booking.com has announced its new AI Trip Planner, introduced in beta to a selection of US travellers using the company’s app effective 28 June.
Built upon the foundation of Booking.com’s existing machine learning models that recommend destination and accommodation options to millions of travellers on the platform daily, the AI Trip Planner is also partially powered by large language model (LLM) technology from OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to create a new conversational experience for people to start their trip planning process.
A new way to search on Booking.com
Travellers can ask the AI Trip Planner general travel-related questions, as well as more specific queries to support any stage of their trip planning process, including scoping out potential destinations and accommodation options, providing travel inspiration based on the individual traveller’s needs and requirements, as well as creating itineraries for a particular city, country or region. It gives travellers a personal travel valet offering the kind of input that, up until now, has been exclusive to the travel agency space.
More tailored and relevant travel recommendations
Travellers can easily chat with the pilot AI Trip Planner to describe what they’re looking for in broad or specific terms, ask questions and refine their search in real time, with new options surfacing in seconds.
From looking for inspiration on romantic beach destination options in the Caribbean to zeroing in on a specific list of vacation homes for a family of four with air conditioning and a pool, the AI Trip Planner makes recommendations in a quick, conversational way.
Integrated travel planning experience
The AI Trip Planner takes the trip planning process one step further by providing travellers with a visual list of destinations and properties, including Booking.com’s pricing information, with deep links to view more details. Travellers can go back and forth between their chat with the AI Trip Planner and the Booking.com app interface as they consider options for their trip. With just a tap on any accommodation they are interested in, they can complete the reservation, as the AI Trip Planner is directly integrated into the booking experience in the Booking.com app.
“Our primary aim at Booking.com has always been to leverage technology to make travel easier,” said Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel.
“The recent developments with generative AI are accelerating the work we’ve been doing for years with machine learning to enhance and improve every aspect of the customer experience on our platform, whether optimising the right order to display a hotel’s photos or surfacing the most relevant reviews. Our new AI Trip Planner is simply the next step in our ongoing journey to explore how we can bring even more value, and hopefully enjoy, to the entire trip planning process.”
Beginning 28 June, the beta AI Trip Planner became available to a small sample of Booking.com Genius members in the US and will continue rollout to US Travellers over the next few weeks to remaining members resident in the US. To use the AI Trip Planner, they must be signed in to their US Booking.com account in the app and have their language settings set to English.
