Berlin-based Parloa, which develops AI customer service agents for Booking.com and others, raised $350M at a $3B valuation, taking its total funding to $560M+
Berlin-founded group raises $350mn as it looks to expand its AI customer service agents — Florian Müller in Frankfurt and Melissa Heikkilä in London
OpenAI announces apps that work inside ChatGPT, piloting Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow for logged-in users outside of the EU
A new generation of apps you can chat with and the tools for developers to build them. — Try in ChatGPT(opens in a new window)Start building apps(opens in a new window)
Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and others are preparing for AI agents, which could disrupt the travel agent business model and upend the $1.6T travel market
Booking.com, Expedia and Airbnb face threat of a technology that could bypass them as people make travel arrangements
The EU's top court says Booking.com's restrictions on hotels offering lower rates on their websites or on rival sites are unnecessary and may reduce competition
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters :
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 :
Italy opens a probe into Booking.com, saying the website's handling of hotels in its Preferred Partner Programme “seems likely to hinder effective competition”
Giulia Segreti / Reuters :
Booking.com says it is facing a provisional €486M fine from Spain's antitrust watchdog, which is accusing the online travel group of anti-competitive practices
Regulators seek to clamp down on world's biggest online travel group as part of efforts to control tech dominance
Sources: EU regulators plan to block Booking.com's €1.63B acquisition of Sweden-based Etraveli due to competition concerns; UK's CMA approved the deal in 2022
Javier Espinoza / Financial Times :
Booking.com will cut and outsource 2,700 call center jobs globally in the next few months; Booking Holdings laid off ~25% of its workforce in 2020 and 2021
Dennis Schaal / Skift : Tweets: @denschaal and @rafat Tweets: Dennis Schaal / @denschaal : Not great timing considering upcoming Super Bowl ad. https://booking.com/ to Eliminate 2,700 Customer Servic...
Booking.com will cut and outsource 2,700 call center jobs globally in the next few months, after Booking Holdings laid of ~25% of its workforce in 2020 and 2021
Skift Take — We could hear more about Booking Holdings' rationale for eliminating a chunk of Booking.com's customer service workforce … Tweets: @denschaal and @rafat Tweets: Dennis Schaal / @denscha...