Artificial intelligence is set to transform the travel industry, but CTO of Expedia, which oversees a massive online travel network with 770 million loyalty members and over 50,000 business partners Rathi Murthy believes the company is well positioned to profit.
Because aside from top brands such as Travelocity, VRBO, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Trivago, Wotif and CarRentals.com, the $14 billion online travel service has the most valuable possession of its data: 70 petabytes. of traveler information is stored. on the AWS cloud.
“Data is our heartbeat,” says Murthy. Two years ago he joined Expedia Group as CTO and President of Expedia Product and Technology, after serving as his CTO at Verizon Media during the building of his 5G. “We have such a huge ecosystem that we have been able to really drive personalized behavior for travelers.”
And with the expansion and consumer adoption of AI, facilitated by recent advances such as ChatGPT, Expedia is making extensive use of analytics and machine learning to drive its personalization strategy, helping to increase the number of customers and partners. increase, it should be able to help the travel industry evolve. says Mercy.
“AI is a big enabler for us. It’s nothing new for us, but ChatGPT democratizes AI and bringing the two together, data and AI, is very powerful,” she said. He pointed out that Expedia currently runs about 600 million AI predictions annually from its massive data repository.
two-way transformation
The Seattle-based travel giant has come a long way since it was founded as a division of Microsoft in 1996 and became an independent public company in 1999. Expedia Group has more than 21 of his brands and more than 50,000 of his B2B partners, connecting them with more than three of his companies. Millions of hotels and rental properties, over 500 airlines and cruise lines, car rental agencies.
Still, online travel services have significant upside potential, Murthy said, estimating that only 20% of travel professionals and consumers currently use online systems for booking.
Expedia holds about 10% share of the booking and online booking market, according to 6sense Revenue AI figures, competing with more than 20 competitors, including TripAdvisor, which holds 46% share of total revenue. . Airbnb makes up 23% of him. and Booking.com, which has about 7% of the online booking market.
To help Expedia maximize the potential of online travel bookings, Murthy devised a two-pronged approach to its best competitors to continue growing Expedia’s revenue, reaching 120% by 2022. over a billion dollars.
Her core strategy consists of two distinct but interrelated transformations. One is the ongoing internal transformation of Expedia’s infrastructure in a unified and integrated manner, and the other is her leading the transformation of the online travel industry itself, said her CTO. I’m here.
“There is a lot of legacy in the travel industry. [technology and processes] And not everyone has the technology strengths and capabilities that we do,” she said, adding that Expedia is helping travel agencies digitize and bring the travel industry into the online realm. pointed out that it is trying to establish itself as a basic platform for
“It’s not just changing yourself. It’s transforming the travel industry,” she says. “About 80% of the industry is still offline.”
Expedia Group systematically developed a multi-stage plan for its digital transformation and began moving workloads to the AWS Cloud in 2017, before Mercy’s arrival. More than 90% of her company’s data is now stored on her AWS, she says.
Mercy’s mission came at a perfect time, as the commercial use of AI is exploding and targeting the general public. Until now, AI platforms have been used primarily within enterprises to build machine learning models by data scientists, software engineers and IT professionals. However, SaaS vendors can incorporate conversational AI tools such as chatbots and generative AI models enabled by platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to democratize AI as a service that any consumer can use. increasing.
The consumerization of AI is a trend Marcy is keenly watching, and believes it will drive further opportunities for personalization in the travel industry.
take a chance
To this end, Expedia recently incorporated two OpenAI plugins to enhance conversational capabilities for travelers within the browser and within the Expedia service itself.
According to Mercy, one implementation will allow users to search for London trips on the web, automatically providing consumers with a seamless booking experience on Expedia. Another plugin resides within his Expedia application, allowing travelers to have a “conversational feature” for all aspects of their travel plans. Currently available in English for iOS devices.
“Marriage ChatGPT Data” [such as questions from travelers] Leveraging Expedia’s travel-specific data, such as traveler preferences, booking patterns, and pricing availability, is extremely powerful,” said the CTO, noting that the combination of technologies will bring complete itineraries to consumers. I added that it can be created. “We saw a lot of traffic. It was very good in terms of trip planning.”
The Expedia team was able to deploy the plugin within 3-4 weeks. “This is precisely because our AI capabilities and travel platform APIs are so mature,” Murthy says.
Other companies, such as CPG multinational Unilever and omnichannel used car retailer CarMax, have also quickly incorporated ChatGPT and the GPT API into their services and applications.
But analysts suggest that these early implementations of generative AI are still a long way from having any meaningful effect.
“In the early stages, the ChatGPT functionality within the Expedia app will be limited. Real-time pricing information will not be accessible and users will not be able to book through this functionality. Recommendations only,” said Brad Jasinski, Director Analyst, Gartner for Marketers.
Jasinski also said he wasn’t sure if consumers would use the chat-powered AI system for travel in conjunction with online booking systems, but if so, he said, “We’re going to use Expedia’s experience with other online travel agencies. It may be possible to discriminate against
IDC analyst Dorothy Creamer suggests that Expedia’s close collaboration with its partners puts it well-positioned for the AI era.
“Expedia is building a data platform based on 25 years of travel and booking behavior.This level and depth of data will help drive more personalized booking and travel experiences in the post-pandemic era. “It’s essential to our business,” Creamer said, adding that the company will also “build a detailed bench of data scientists to help unearth value from booking data. These data points can generate thousands of data points per page of booking information. We need to evaluate the sort of thing.”
Creamer said Expedia’s products also provide hotels, airlines, car rental agencies and other partners with the building blocks to process deep customer insights and connect them to real traveler behavior. It points out that it is built for “This will require advanced data analytics that AI and ML-driven capabilities and platforms can provide,” she says.
Still, Expedia’s Murthy is fully aware of the ethical concerns surrounding AI and wants to ensure Expedia is a fair and free marketplace for all users.
“We closely monitor their governance and ethics to make sure they respect privacy when sharing information,” Murthy said. “This is something we all need to be careful about, and we need to work together as a concrete community to ensure that AI is used for good and that best practices are being leveraged across the industry. .”
