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Climate change directly impacts travel businesses: They have to handle emergency incidents on the ground caused by fires or floods and cater to customers looking for more sustainable choices.

Generative AI is already prompting travel businesses to retool internal operations and release new products.

Travel brands have increasingly looked to use emerging technology in their operations, especially generative artificial intelligence. What are major trends in travel technology? We put the question to Ask Skift, our artificial intelligence chatbot. It used information appearing in both our past news coverage and Skift Research. We also conducted additional reporting.

Google this week released a new version of generative AI technology that it says rivals ChatGPT. The technology, called Gemini Pro, has replaced the previous tech that powers the chatbot Bard. 

It’s not without its tensions, but Google and Booking Holdings have long had a mutually beneficial relationship: Google gets billions of dollars from Booking’s ads, and Booking benefits from all of the customers Google sends along.

Leveraging work from Google Xi’s The Neu Project, Marriott strives to create a more inclusive experience for meeting attendees.

This weekend, F1 fans can expect a visually enthralling experience, as custom real-time content tracks across the world’s largest LED screen of the Sphere, as part of the official broadcast for the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

In Part I of our series on Google Travel, we analyzed the hotel distribution landscape in the U.S. by web-scraping over 5,000 hotels and their respective distribution offerings across Google’s sponsored and organic auctions.

Google teamed up with South Africa’s tourism department Monday to boost travel marketing efforts after a government inquiry concluded in July that Google’s practices impede competition.

Google on late Thursday outlined its highly anticipated updates to Google Maps, which it began rolling out to users in a select list of cities — mainly in North America and Europe to start.

Vrbo has recently severed ties with “a large number” of its vacation rental hosts who have cancelled too many guest bookings without valid reasons.

Four years after Google debuted a vacation rental feature in Google Travel, it is starting to show booking links and nightly rates from multiple companies for each listing rather than from just one.

Expedia increased spending 10 times over five years to advertise vacation home rentals on Google, but the online travel agency saw no increase in traffic because the search giant has been prioritizing its own flight and hotel products. 

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, October 19. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Skift Research conducted an extensive data-scraping of the Google Hotels platform to understand Google’s role in the hotel distribution landscape.

John Legend is a founder of a startup building what it says is an “invite-only” social media app for restaurant reviews.

Despite sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence, online fake reviews remain a problem. And now, major online travel, retail and review platforms have formed a coalition to combat them.

eTraveli Group was left at the altar last week when the European Commission blocked its acquisition by Booking Holdings on antitrust grounds. Booking is appealing, but eTraveli CEO Mathias Hedlund said the $1.8 billion deal would be “no longer in play.” “We are a bigger fish now than we were at the time,” Hedlund said in an exclusive interview with Skift, referring to when the company signed the merger deal in November 2021. He said eTraveli is 2.4 times larger than before the pandemic.

Amid the experience sector’s digital transformation, a notable trend is emerging: the importance of direct bookings, with smaller tour operators looking to capitalize on the next wave for experience travel businesses.

Expedia Group is launching a new program called EG Labs to give some consumers early access to tests for its Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo products.

Google has released an updated version of the Bard generative AI chatbot that includes extensions with real-time travel data for flights and hotels.