Digital travel platform, Booking.com, has announced the beta launch of an AI Trip Planner to a selection of US travellers in the company’s app on 28 June. Built upon the foundation of Booking.com’s existing machine learning models that recommend destination and accommodation options to travellers on the platform every day, 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.
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.
Travellers can 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 surfaced in a few seconds.
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 accommodation 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 it’s optimising the right order to display a hotel’s photos to 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 enjoyment, to the entire trip planning process.”
From 28 June onwards, the beta AI Trip Planner will become available to a growing percentage of Booking.com Genius members in the United States over the coming weeks. US travellers must be signed in to their Booking.com account in the app and have their language settings set to English to access the new tool.
