Interview: Expedia CEO on How Its AI Rollouts Would Be Impossible for Prior Regimes

25.08.2023 - 13:37 / skift.com / Dara Khosrowshahi / Brian Chesky / Dennis Schaal / Peter Kern

Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern, who’s been working on revamping the company since April 2020, said “it would’ve been impossible for the old us, three years ago,” to have been nimble enough to be among the first movers in generative AI among online travel companies.

Expedia’s iOS app now has a ChatGPT chatbot, and the company rolled out a plug-in for OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. Booking Holdings’ Kayak and Opentable have plug-ins, as well.

It’s impossible to know if ex-Expedia CEOs Dara Khosrowshahi (2005-2017) and Mark Okerstrom (2017-2019) could have introduced ChatGPT tools as fast as the company did under Kern, and he wasn’t looking to disparage his predecessors. You can make an argument that the two former CEOs could have done it, as well.

But Kern, who thinks the toughest big lifts are behind him other than a loyalty program launch coming in July and getting vacation rental brand Vrbo onto the Expedia tech stack, has been busy remaking Expedia over the last three years. He has shed brands, prioritized the big three Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo among formerly a couple dozen units, and consolidated teams across the company so they aren’t focused on one particular brand or another.

In a Skift interview last week, Kern discussed the promise and hype of generative AI, and how he doesn’t count out Google from eventually delivering a viable tool.

However, he hopes Bing will gain ground with its investment in OpenAI to ensure a more competitive search engine environment.

Kern scoffed at a statement from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky that Airbnb will be a transformed company in another year because of generative AI.

“In a year? We’ve been at this a long time,” Kern said. Airbnb isn’t a newbie, though, to artificial intelligence, either.

Kern also had some good things to say about app-only online travel agency Hopper, but disparaged some of its fintech products — Kern called them “insure-tech” — as being a ripoff to consumers.

As people return to big cities, Expedia will start to focus on urban short-term rental inventory, which is not Vrbo’s strength. However, don’t expect to find private rooms on Expedia, Hotels.com or Vrbo.

Read the interview, which has been edited for clarity and trimmed, below.

Dennis Schaal: Did you get an advantage with ChatGPT because OpenAi CEO Sam Altman is on your board?

Peter Kern: Look, Sam’s obviously a thought leader in the space, but we didn’t have any inside track to what was happening, or when it was coming. We didn’t know anything.”

Schaal: He wasn’t at the board meetings saying “Guys, wait until you see this?”

Kern: No, he was saying, “We’re working on this great stuff, it’s going to change everything.” But he was saying that to the world. It wasn’t any secret. And then