Artificial Intelligence Key to Travel Industry: Expedia CEO

The largest travel platform in the world is confident Artificial Intelligence is going to continue to transform the travel industry as we know it and is something partners should embrace.

Expedia Travel Group CEO Mark Okerstrom held a Q & A Thursday at the company’s annual conference, where he fielded questions that focused much on how technology is affecting and changing the travel booking landscape.

Quick to debunk the perception that AI is “about robots and crazy wild things,” Okerstom explained that it’s about computing capability and the ability to process vast amounts of data in real time and write software that is able to instruct applications to do different things, based on the data that we see.

“Take for example, a traveler who is looking at a property and wondering, does it have a pool? How far is it from the beach?” Okerstrom explains. “You can actually speak into your phone or type a text. We know in our database whether it has a pool or the distance to the beach. We are using these algorithms to respond to these questions and then we’re starting to put the answers onto the detail page of the hotel. This is all happening in an automated way.”

Okerstrom says while current voice recognition services are a popular form of AI, it is only a subset of a larger and more integrated, hybrid experience. Travellers will still want to see photos, and have a human connection, but companies can save money having AI answer the basic questions travelers ask. It’s a service he sees Expedia offering in the next few years.

“When we talk about the future, we talk about the platform mindset that we want to power and enable our partners to be successful and to reduce their costs,” he says. “If you were to ask me if in five or ten years from now if we could have a conversation service that we could actually provide to our hotel partners, that they can integrate into their applications to help answer these in an automatic way, I think it’s very possible.”