Expedia Group leans into B2B arm, adding new APIs, advertising capabilities

Expedia Group announced Wednesday that it will expand its B2B vertical with new application programming interfaces (APIs) and new advertising features to help partners grow and improve traveler engagement. The company also unveiled new generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered discovery features for travelers.

The announcement comes on the heels of Expedia Group’s Q1 earnings last week. Results fell within company guidance, partially thanks to its B2B arm—which has a large international presence—as inbound and domestic travel demand to and in the United States softened.

Expedia Group provides travel distribution services to more than 60,000 partners including Walmart, Delta Air Lines, SoFi and Chase Travel and last year those partnerships brought in $4.1 billion, a 21% increase year over year, and have regularly outpaced its B2C results. CEO Ariane Gorin formerly led Expedia for Business before transitioning into the top role at the company last May.

“As the leading B2B travel platform, Expedia Group is investing to help partners grow faster and serve travelers better,” Gorin said in a release. “With our new APIs, as well as expanded tools in Expedia Group Advertising, we’re giving partners the technology, reach and intelligence they need to compete at scale. At the same time, we’re harnessing the power of GenAI [generative AI] to transform how travelers discover, plan and book their next trip.”

Expanded API capabilities

As part of its spring release, Expedia Group said it is scaling its Private Label Solutions, which leads its B2B segments. To do so, the company is launching APIs powered by AI and automation, with a goal of giving partners the ability to drive engagement, loyalty and boost revenue.

“Private label solutions continues to deliver record-breaking growth because partners trust our technology to power their travel ambitions,” said Alfonso Paredes, president of Private Label Solutions at Expedia Group.

Paredes continued: “We’ve built the largest connected B2B travel network in the world, and it’s the strength of those connections that drive real results. Our newly announced APIs take that even further, making it easier for partners to access more supply and leverage our intelligence. We delivered more than 135 million room nights globally in 2024, and we’re just getting started.”

The new connections will essentially allow any partner to act as an online travel agency (OTA).

The additions include a car API that will provide access to the inventory of more than 110 brands in 190 countries and territories, including exclusive offers from 43 brands.

And, as the tours and activities sector continues to boom, with Airbnb relaunching its Experiences category, Expedia Group is also launching an activities API that will offer more than 170,000 bookable experiences across the globe.

Additionally, the company is launching an insurance API that is first being tested through its travel agent booking platform Expedia TAAP. It will allow partners to offer trip protection and an air API to combine flights, car rentals and lodging for an all encompassing booking experience, perhaps moving Expedia Group partners one step closer to the long-discussed connected trip concept.

Additionally, Expedia Group is offering a reservation management API with 15 added features to help streamline hotel operations; it's intended to help with the management of bookings, data recovery, payments and more. The API is built with GraphQL.

The company said B2B partners are also now able to use a new sponsored listings feature through Expedia Group Advertising, formerly Media Solutions, to reach new audiences.

AI features for discovery

The OTA also shared AI-related updates, following up on the strategies Gorin laid out in February.

"AI is unlocking new possibilities for how people discover, book and experience travel," Gorin said Wednesday at the company's event. "Travelers are finding their next adventures through social media content creators and increasingly through AI-powered search, and that shift is opening new doors of engagement."

Expedia Group said it is working on improving its search and discovery abilities through its owned platforms via an integration with OpenAI’s Operator and Microsoft Copilot Actions. The company said with the integrations, it aims to close a gap between the discussion of travel on generative AI platforms and the actual action of booking a trip.

Expedia Group is also using AI to “reimagine” how travelers are going through the discovery process. It referenced last week’s announcement of Expedia Trip Matching, which is in beta and will officially launch in June on Instagram.

The OTA has launched a new AI agent on Hotels.com, intending to combine natural language discovery, servicing and shopping to create a single-entry point and end-to-end experience for users via the brand’s homepage. The AI agent can use Expedia Group’s data to share recommendations, real-time pricing, reviews and images. If a user has made a booking already, the agent has the capability to help them through any changes.

The agent on Hotels.com comes after Expedia Group's with its AI releases in 2024, including the introduction of its AI travel assistant Romie, which came as a pilot and is now defunct. 

"We had Romie, and then we had a virtual agent," Shilpa Ranganathan, chief product officer of Expedia Group, said in an interview with PhocusWire. "Most people, when they come in ... it's a box. I [the traveler] want to be able to type in a box and have you [Expedia] figure out what I'm here for. And so we're really trying to figure out, how do we reduce that cognitive load on a customer's brain so that there's a single entry point?"

The AI agent, which is live now on Hotels.com, is Expedia Group's answer to that question. 

"We basically ended up using the pilot to [learn], and then we realized that people don't like the split path," Ranganathan said. "So we said, 'let's bring them both together.' ... So we call it AI agent, because it does both what Romie used to do and what the old virtual agent used to do."

However, there are some differences. The new AI agent, for example, does not interact with travelers in text or WhatsApp conversations like Romie was capable of doing. That feature, Ranganathan said, didn't appeal to travelers enough to keep as part of the tool.

While the AI agent is currently available only on Hotels.com, it will be made available on Expedia Group's other brand platforms later this year.

"It skews people who are early adopters," Ranganathan said of Hotels.com. "So for us, it was like, this is a great place to start with this, because obviously the feedback has informed the merging of these agents. But we also want to have a hypothesis that customers will find it easy to use and end up using it. And so we started with Hotels.com, but we're going to bring it to all our brands." 

Additionally, Expedia Group said that “behind the scenes,” the company’s proprietary Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI) system is working to improve personalization capabilities and to scale in an effort to modernize travel discovery, to make inspiration “more dynamic, data-driven and instantly actionable.” The ACI system will do this by moderating upwards of 400 videos per day, optimizing engagement and generating content.

Expedia Group has a fairly lengthy history of AI experimentation. It became one of the first companies to play with generative AI in 2023 when it launched a ChatGPT plugin and later when it integrated a large language model into its Expedia app to assist with trip planning. In September 2023, the company updated Expedia, Vrbo and Hotels.com apps with a natural language interface to assist with traveler queries.

Ranganathan said the company is seeing substantial results from its AI efforts. She opened up about AI progress on LinkedIn.

"Our AI-powered service agent now handles more than 143 million conversations a year," Ranganathan said. "Over 50% of traveler requests are resolved without needing human support ... Customer satisfaction scores are 2x higher for travelers who self-serve than those who call in."

"What we really want to do is streamline these travelers' decision making journey and give them the confidence to go faster," Ranganathan added Wednesday on stage at Expedia's headquarters.

New advertising capabilities

The company is also launching solutions for travel advertisers. Expedia Group Advertising, previously called Media Solutions, announced a suite of upgrades to assist partners as they seek to meet travelers in the inspiration phase.

The new creative tools include the ability to co-create shoppable travel content “at speed and at scale” to reach more than 50 million accounts following Beautiful Destinations, as part of a partnership launched in April.

The company said it is also allowing partners to use Expedia Group’s first-party data to help target high-intent audiences offsite through its existing partnership with The Trade Desk.

In a new loyalty offering, destination marketing organizations will now be able to “sponsor” OneKeyCash bonus traveler rewards to reward destination visits in order to improve bookings and loyalty from members.

“We’re helping partners reach high-intent travelers with the right message at the right moment,” said Rob Torres, senior vice president of Expedia Group Advertising. “Through our travel media network, we continue to launch new solutions across data, loyalty and strategic partnerships to drive results and deliver more value for travelers.”