Tripadvisor recently partnered with Nvidia, Nebius and Nexla to show what the future of end-to-end travel planning could look like with artificial intelligence (AI).
The company is looking for ways to streamline travel planning—to make it simpler, smarter and more personalized, Rahul Todkar, vice president and head of data and AI for Tripadvisor, wrote on LinkedIn.
In a live demonstration at Nvidia GTC 2026, attendees inserted an influencer’s video into an experimental tool on Tripadvisor’s native AI experience, he wrote.
The tool found locations and experiences featured in the video, cross-referenced them with Tripadvisor's data and created a personalized itinerary that was "ready-to-book" for the user, according to Todkar.
“Planning a trip is exciting…but it’s also complex,” Todkar wrote, sharing a demo video. “Hours (sometimes weeks) go into researching and sorting through ideas, options and prices across dozens of sources. As AI and agentic workflows evolve, our teams have been experimenting, testing and iterating on ways to make that process easier.”
Todkar told PhocusWire Tuesday that Tripadvisor offered the travel focus, Nvidia served as the model provider layer, Nibius provided the backbone and Nexla offered data integration.
“Knowledge and expertise is what really is the key here.”
While Todkar said it wasn’t that hard to pull the feature together, he did identify a couple challenges.
Video processing, for example, proved to be difficult.
“Understanding the right context, meaning out of the videos and then mapping that to our existing POIs [points of interest] … all the things we have on our site … connecting those two dots was the number one challenge,” he said.
Personalization was another hurdle, according to Todkar, who said the company has been performing specific experiments to learn more about both.
Testing and experimentation comes next.
“We do explore and do a lot of pilots on our site, especially with our AI-focused chip planning application,” Todkar said. “This will be one of those features. We'll try to test and see what the user response is.”
If all goes well, the feature can be pushed into live production.
Last year, Expedia Group debuted its AI-powered Trip Matching feature, which allows users to turn Instagram Reels into bookable itineraries.
When asked about the similarity between the two initiatives, Todkar said he’s seen early versions of the feature. He said the concept is the same but the execution might be a little different.
“Inspiration can come from anywhere,” he said. “More and more inspiration is your social media, your AI platforms, your top of the funnel. What users are increasingly telling us is they want to take that inspiration into trip planning, then booking.”
Inspiration to planning to booking has to become seamless.
“All brands, I'm sure, are thinking about that,” he said. “The differentiation becomes, how do you bring your own data? How do you bring your own personalization? And how do you drive actions faster?”
Todkar said Tripadvisor is pushing further into AI-first features.
“This is one of those features,” he said. “There's a lot more we have in the hopper, and this is just an exciting space to be in.”