Q&A with Booking CEO Glenn Fogel on the company's Booking.com, OpenTable, Kayak, Priceline, and Agoda brands, using AI to book trips, hotels, and more
Nilay Patel / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Booking is framing AI around assistance across a portfolio that spans lodging, restaurant reservations, metasearch, and regional travel brands. The company had already put this direction into practice when Priceline worked with Google Cloud on an AI trip-planning chatbot.
The discussion places Booking in a travel-platform race where AI is increasingly treated as part of the booking journey, rather than a standalone support feature. Airbnb’s later focus on AI agents alongside new travel services illustrates the same push to make platforms more useful across a trip.
First-order effects
- Booking’s brands can use AI assistance to guide customers from trip planning toward hotel and related-service bookings, potentially making cross-brand discovery more integrated.
- Glenn Fogel’s strategy discussion makes AI a portfolio-level priority for Booking.com, OpenTable, Kayak, Priceline, and Agoda rather than an isolated product experiment.
Second-order effects
- Travel rivals and metasearch services face pressure to improve conversational planning and recommendations, particularly where users expect a single interface to span search and booking.
- Restaurant and travel suppliers may see more demand routed through platform recommendations, increasing the importance of how their inventory, availability, and attributes are represented in Booking’s systems.
Third-order effects
- If AI planning becomes a primary entry point, online travel competition may shift from winning a search query to owning the full intent-to-transaction workflow—a form of the concierge-style travel interface Priceline was developing.
- The durable question is whether AI assistants increase platform conversion or give users more power to compare across providers; that outcome will shape the bargaining position of large travel marketplaces and their suppliers.
The trend: Travel platforms are embedding AI into planning and booking flows to capture more of the customer journey before a reservation is made.