Excerpt from PhocusWire
Less than two weeks after it became one of the first travel brands to provide a plugin for ChatGPT, Expedia Group has added a new travel planning tool to the brand Expedia mobile app that uses the artificial intelligence-powered large language model.
The beta version of the new tool is rolling out this week globally in Expedia’s iOS app in English, with plans to launch in other languages in the future.
In an industry that is often criticized for moving slowly on new technologies, to say Expedia Group’s integration has been fast-tracked seems like an understatement. ChatGPT itself only launched November 30.
In announcing the new in-app tool, Expedia Group CTO Rathi Murthy says it has been built in “just over the last month,” with the speed in part attributed to work the company has been doing for years to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into its systems.
“Our maturity we’ve had in AI has been for a very long time … and we have been a platform, so we have APIs across the board. So really leveraging our APIs … in close partnership with OpenAI to bring those two APIs together, it was just a matter of a few weeks,” she said.
“And [then] we spent a few weeks training our models to make sure that our responses continue to be in Expedia’s voice, culture and ethics so that’s where we spent most of our time - writing our models to make sure we continue to give the right responses.”
Now in the Expedia iOS app in English, users that are logged in have the option to select “Explore trip ideas with ChatGPT.” In the chat interface, users can have an open-ended conversation to get recommendations for a trip itinerary including hotels, rentals, flights, experiences and ground transportation, with results pulled from Expedia Group’s travel data.
For hotel results, the system automatically saves properties suggested in the conversation to a “trip board” in the app, where users can click through to look at pricing, reviews, photos and to complete the booking. For other recommendations, such as things to do, the trip board links through to the traditional in-app search function.
The chat is set up to show three to five hotel results. Murthy says the sort order is similar to Expedia’s regular search function, with results “based on our knowledge of your question, your criteria, what you are looking for, our smart-shopping algorithms as well as availability, pricing and how we render the best hotel for you.”
In the traditional hotel search on the Expedia app, the company includes a note on how it recommends properties, saying, “… a booking from which we earn more compensation will feature higher in our search results listing compared to other properties with similar offers where we are paid less compensation on the booking.”
When asked if this same policy of factoring in commissions is used for the results provided by ChatGPT in the Expedia app, an Expedia Group spokesperson said, “No. The ChatGPT Expedia app integration is not using the same policy as the traditional Expedia search.”
Now the question for Expedia and the industry more broadly is – will travelers want to use ChatGPT to plan, shop and book travel through an online travel agency?
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