AI vs. AI: Expedia plans to battle it out with Google, Microsoft for travel planning

Tech companies are using AI to strengthen their services, and Expedia says it wants to use the technology to create personalised travel recommendations for people. It aims to tap people and want them to ditch search engines for planning a vacation.

Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, told The Verge that the company aims to get users to plan their trips in one place. The platform will return with recommendations trained with its flight and hotel information library and informed by users’ travel preferences.

“By being able to train large language models on our data, this rich 70 petabytes’ worth of data we’ve gathered over the years, we can eventually recommend places to go and stay and do and continue to refine and personalise that,” Naidu was quoted as saying.

Apart from offering AI-powered customer service features, the company also helps property owners describe their homes and hotels.

Expedia’s former chief financial officer Jeff Hurst testified during the US vs Google antitrust trial that despite increasing the payments to Google for ad space, traffic on its website never increased after the search engine began showing flights and hotels.

Google Travel for hotel, fightsGoogle has a travel service called Google Travel. It was previously launched on Android and iPhones but the company pulled the plug on the app and it is only available on a browser. Besides this, Google Search is also one of the go-to places to check flight tickets, hotels and prepare itineraries for vacations.

Google has also added generative AI capabilities and Bard AI chatbot that can help users find all the details in an easy-to-read format.

Microsoft’s Bing TravelMicrosoft Bing with Copilot now has a dedicated space to help users book tickets and hotels as well as offer car rental options. It also provides users with high-quality images, videos and articles from the internet in a user-friendly way.