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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only changing the ways in which people travel—such as by powering personalized itineraries or enabling real-time translations—it’s also transforming where they find travel inspiration and how they book their travel plans. Booking Holdings’ Q3 earnings call offered proof of that. Booking Holdings—which owns Priceline, Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda, and OpenTable—shared updates about its test program with OpenAI. And the company reported an especially strong quarter amid AI integration. Gross bookings climbed 14% to $49.7 billion, and revenue jumped 13% to $9 billion. Meanwhile, the company reported 8% year-over-year growth in room nights, which hit $323 million. Booking Holding’s overall net income was up 9%, bumping up to $2.7 billion, according to the report. At its recent developer conference, OpenAI announced the launch of pilot partners within ChatGPT, including Booking.com. Glenn Fogel, Booking Holdings’ chief executive officer (CEO) and president, reportedly stated that Booking.com is “very happy to be in the first wave of apps with OpenAI.” “I think that says something about us and the value we bring to partners, that they would do it with us to get going,” Fogel continued. Booking Holdings chief financial officer (CFO), Ewout Steenbergen, added that Booking.com is observing “faster search, better conversion, lower cancellation rates and high customer satisfaction.” He added that, while these numbers are only “early signals,” they are “overall, very encouraged… with what [they’re] seeing,” especially as they continue to develop a layer of intelligence that can ultimately identify and respond to customers’ individual travel preferences. While traditional search continues to climb each year, leads from large language models (LLMs) are steadily growing, as well. “Probably, over time, these two worlds might become more hybrid because we are seeing, of course, more AI being built into browsers at this point in time,” Steenbergen added. Asia, in particular, showed the most growth, largely fueled by Agoda, a local regional platform based in Singapore, and Booking.com, which operates on a more global scale. Steenbergen said that Asia is the most important market going forward since the GDP growth is the highest there. Overall, the combination of creative marketing and AI is seemingly setting travel bookings (and travelers) skyward. “We’re making a lot of investments in terms of our product, in terms of our marketing, in terms of our supply, and overall we are happy with the growth we’re seeing,” Steenbergen said.
