Expedia Joins Companies Pushing Back on ChatGPT Hype

25.08.2023 - 14:01 / skift.com / Justin Dawes / Rob Francis

Despite all the hype around what generative AI could mean for the travel industry, the online travel agencies seem to be in agreement — there is potential, but there’s a lot of work to be done first. 

Rathi Murthy, chief technology officer for Expedia Group, shared that sentiment in a call with journalists this week. 

“It’s a model that is yet to unfold,” Murthy said. She has had executive and other leadership roles in technology for companies in several sectors, including Verizon Media, Gap Inc., American Express, Ebay, Yahoo, and WebMD. 

“Honestly, the travel industry as a whole has a lot of legacy technology, and it’s not super easy to move in and adopt some of this. But I do see players like us — players that have core technology in the background, large OTAs — start jumping in to experiment and try things out. And we are right in there.”

Expedia Group owns multiple online travel agency and booking brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, CarRentals.com, and more. 

Expedia has been investing in AI and other technologies to make these platforms and internal operations more efficient for a while, she said. ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot made by OpenAI, has shown that it can help users with pre-trip planning, but that’s pretty much the extent so far. 

“We don’t see generative AI, today, being able to replace this whole gamut of services. Planning a trip is just way more complex than just a bunch of questions,” Murthy said. 

The real value with generative AI, as experts have said, is not in the chatbot alone but how the technology can be used in the background — overlayed by large swaths of data — to power the future of how these platforms will operate. Though it is unclear exactly how that will look, these platforms will likely be able to make full use of data to personalize interactions in a more comprehensive way, even anticipating users’ needs. 

“I think there’s potential for us to leverage both of these together to drive transformation. But there’s a lot yet to be done. There’s still a lot of training in the voice and the output that comes from some of the generative AI. There’s a lot of things we are keeping our eye on,” Murthy said. 

There is a future for the technology — Rob Francis, chief technology officer of online travel agency Booking.com, said he is sure of that. But we’ll have to wait to understand its full potential. While the hype may die down a bit in the meantime, travel companies are investing in the long game. 

Booking.com is researching internally so that when the company does release generative AI capabilities, the technology is good and ready, Francis said. Singapore-based Trip.com is also doing the research but a bit more publicly,