Booking Holdings is looking at artificial intelligence (AI) and
agentic developments from an “offensive” rather than defensive position, according to its CFO.
Ewout Steenbergen said the company believes there will be an
expansion in the total addressable market and that AI developments will accelerate the offline to online shift. Speaking at the Nasdaq Investor Conference, he said 30% of the market
remains offline.
He also said Booking Holdings sees opportunity in consumers
being able to keep their travel within one “agentic experience environment.”
“This gives us opportunity to really create more of a share
of wallet and bigger experience of connecting the dots of travel.”
He went on to discuss the company’s channels and said
there will be a huge mix in the future, and the world will not move
to one modal.
"In the paid channels this is going to be of huge benefit
to use because we have had one very large, dominant in traditional search over the
last decade, and most likely there are going to be four, five, six different
winners from a large language model perspective, more diversification—and
where we do have, as a company, a real specialism is running very large
optimization models, more traditional AI, machine learning, where we, all the
time, can optimize our performance marketing spend across all these different
channels.”
Steenbergen said the experience the company and its
brands could provide to direct customers would be even better than it is today.
He said its platforms could create a vertical agent experience “the same as
horizontal agents can do.”
“We can inspire people about where to travel; we can build an itinerary. But then, where these models are stopping is becoming more a lead generator in the future, or handing it over, because all of them have said, ‘We don't want to be a merchant of record; we don't want to be an OTA.’ If someone comes to our environment, the agentic experience continues.”
He added that the company could help travelers across pre-trip, in-trip and post-trip experiences.
Steenbergen also shared some of the areas where Booking Holdings will allocate its $170 million investment fund.
The company plans to expand some existing verticals such as
the attractions business and its advertising business. Investment in OpenTable
is also on the cards as is international expansion through investment in
product and technology in Asia, so the company maintains its “strong position” there.
Generative AI is a further area the company will commit
funds to in trip planning product, and Steenbergen said it is “testing and
learning a lot of different tools within our products in gen AI in order to
know what really has traction in the future.”