Artificial intelligence now manages over 30% of customer support interactions at Expedia Group through self-service channels. The online travel company’s most rapidly expanding marketing avenue involves securing visibility within AI-generated responses.
Additionally, the organization has established travel reservation capabilities within both ChatGPT and Claude platforms.

During Thursday’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Ariane Gorin of the Seattle-based online travel company provided fresh insights into the organization’s artificial intelligence initiatives. Her presentation outlined a dual approach encompassing internal operational
efficiencies and positioning chatbot platforms as emerging customer acquisition channels.

The company posted $3.43 billion in revenue, representing a 15% year-over-year increase, alongside adjusted earnings of $542 million, an 83% jump. The first-quarter profit margin reached 15.8%, marking the highest level seen in 15 years.

Despite these robust first-quarter outcomes, Expedia’s shares declined approximately 6.5% on Friday as the company maintained its full-year projections without adjustment, disappointing investor expectations.

Beyond its primary Expedia website, the company’s portfolio
encompasses Hotels.com, Vrbo, and business-to-business operations that facilitate hotel reservations for various partners, including airlines and corporate travel providers. The previous week brought news of an exclusive hotel partnership with Uber, which will incorporate Expedia’s lodging inventory directly into its application.

The artificial intelligence transformation represents both opportunity and necessity for Expedia’s competitive positioning. The company acknowledges “emerging AI-powered platforms” as competitive threats in its disclosures, highlighting worries that chatbot interfaces might eliminate online travel agencies from the reservation process entirely.

When OpenAI recently reduced its ambitions for enabling direct purchase transactions within ChatGPT, online travel agency stocks rose in March. Gorin expressed little surprise at this strategic retreat, contending that travel reservation and customer service operations involve too much complexity for AI platforms to manage independently.

Should the marketplace shift further toward paid models, she indicated the company stands well-prepared, noting this represents familiar territory. Expedia ranked among the first travel companies to debut as an application within OpenAI’s ChatGPT last October. The organization began running advertisements on ChatGPT in February.

Beyond reservation integrations in ChatGPT and Claude, Gorin mentioned ongoing efforts to establish presence on Google’s Gemini platform as well.

She observed that while traffic and reservations from AI-powered channels remain modest, the company finds encouragement in the composition of new users, conversion performance, and typical transaction values.

Gorin disclosed that Expedia manages approximately 250 million customer service interactions annually, with over half resolved through self-service mechanisms and an increasing proportion driven by artificial intelligence.

The organization has reduced new customer service representative training time by roughly 60%. When customers require human assistance, AI produces summaries of prior conversations, eliminating the need for agents to restart inquiries. The technology now operates across more than 30 languages.

Simultaneously, Expedia has eliminated hundreds of positions across engineering, product, and technology divisions over the past two years, including 162 positions at its Seattle headquarters earlier this year.

Departing CFO Scott Schenkel indicated the company anticipates AI computing expenses will increase during the year’s second half but plans to finance this investment through reductions in other areas. The company did not break out specific AI-related costs as a separate line item in either its earnings report or conference call.

Gorin emphasized the company maintains an aggressive stance on AI adoption while exercising strategic discipline regarding
implementation, carefully evaluating where the technology gets deployed to ensure it generates appropriate returns.