While leisure travel is generally enjoyable, planning for the trip can be stressful – be it finding the best flight deal, hotel or activities to do. This is why Expedia offers a one-stop platform for travellers to search for and book what they need for their trips.
To further eliminate the headache of trip planning, Expedia rolled out a plugin with OpenAI in March so that users can plan trips on ChatGPT’s website using Expedia’s travel data.
“We know that trip planning is a manual process so… we’ve been using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for years to take the complexity out of the planning, shopping, booking and post-booking experience for travellers,” Rathi Murthy, Expedia Group’s chief technology officer, tells DigitalEdge.
She continues: “[Recently, we’ve] launched the Expedia plugin for ChatGPT, which unlocks real-time information on the pricing and availability of flights, hotels, vacation rentals, activities, and car rentals — all powered by our 70 petabytes of travel data and AI models. The plugin opens up a whole new channel for travellers to plan a trip, and our partners benefit from an early jumpstart on this new platform, meeting travellers where they are.”
Despite the benefits of generative AI like ChatGPT for trip planning, Murthy does not foresee it as a threat to online travel agencies.
“Planning a trip is more than just a conversation and an itinerary. Travellers care about efficiency and a seamless, trusted end-to-end experience— this is what we bring to the table. When booking a trip, trust is critical, and the details — like the correct name or date of birth for a flight booking – matter, and getting that wrong could add stress to a trip,” says Murthy.
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Prioritising experiences and needs
The Expedia Group has also baked AI and machine learning into its technology platform, powering its brands, including Expedia.com, Vrbo and Hotel.com, to offer personalised customer experience and build new products that address travellers’ pain points.
Price Tracking and Smart Shopping are among the company’s new AI-powered products. The former uses Expedia’s flight shopping data, AI, and machine learning to compare today’s flight prices with historical price trends to help travellers decide when to book their chosen route. It can also track the price changes to help them book more confidently.
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Expedia's price tracking feature. Photo: Expedia
Meanwhile, Smart Shopping uses AI to read through millions of rate descriptions of the hotels on Expedia’s website to pull out key attributes — such as room features and if breakfast is included — in one place so that travellers can choose the best option.
Murthy also shares that the company offers an AI-powered virtual agent (or chatbot) to ensure travellers get the support they need quickly and efficiently.
“The travellers can easily take simple actions like cancelling a flight through our app. But a traveller can interact with our virtual agent with natural-language processing and understanding for more nuanced actions like requesting a refund. Travellers will be routed to a live agent for support if the issue is more complex. Since launch, we’ve powered nearly 30 million virtual conversations, saving eight million hours in agent and traveller time,” she says.
Transforming for agility and innovation
To ensure that the AI-powered products work effectively, Murthy saw the need to transform Expedia Group’s underlying IT infrastructure when she joined in June 2021. She has led more than 6,000 technologists in the company to rearchitect its existing technology platform and converge its brand platforms into a common tech stack that is secure and scalable.
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Building a common tech stack that could help the organisation increase efficiency, improve the developer experience and reduce platform costs was not easy.
“We have a long history of acquisitions at Expedia Group, which means we inherited multiple tech stacks that were costly to operate and often ran on legacy architecture. Expedia Group’s scale is also huge. Our platforms connect 168 million loyalty members across our brands and 50,000 B2B partners, with three million properties and 500 airlines, car rentals, and cruise lines,” says Murthy.
To add to that challenge, the tech transformation had to happen without disrupting the current business. She adds: “We didn’t have the luxury of pausing our business operations while modernising [our tech infrastructure]. So we had to balance managing our legacy tech while improving behind the scenes — all without disrupting the quality of service.”
“To do this right, it’s important to have an experienced team with diverse skills who can simultaneously work through challenges as they come and expand their skill sets. We have a strong global product and technology organisation at Expedia Group with highly skilled software engineers, data scientists and designers who work to ensure we keep the customer at the forefront when we innovate behind the scenes.”
Since most of the foundational work of its tech transformation has been completed, Expedia Group already sees the benefits in terms of improved agility.
“For example, in a recent design review, we noticed an abnormality in our hotel sort that required a small word change. Making this update across all our brands and their respective web and mobile platforms used to take us several months. But because we’ve centralised all our tools, we were able to make this change in under a week,” she says.
Besides that, the secure and scalable common tech stack enables Murthy and her team to build more innovative AI-powered products for travellers.
She says: “This summer, we plan to roll out our new loyalty programme, One Key, which allows travellers to earn and redeem rewards across all our brands. This is possible because of where we are in our transformation journey. I’m also encouraging the engineers in my team to take time out to experiment with emerging technology, to see where the opportunities are or what we can learn to improve our current products.”
The tech transformation, she adds, is also helping Expedia Group achieve its vision of “powering partners of all sizes with the technology and supply needed to succeed in today’s travel market”. “By rearchitecting our technology platform in an open and accessible way, we can offer an entire e-commerce suite of building blocks, like service or fraud prevention as a service, for anyone in or wanting to enter the travel industry.”
