A Traveler's Choice: Priceline Partners with Google AI for Enhanced Travel Planning

0:00Today on the podcast, we are diving into a very interesting development in the AI travel industry. since ChatGPT first launched, there's been some pretty obvious use cases for this in travel and essentially replacing and becoming a virtual travel agent. We had companies right off the get-go when, you know, GPT4 launched and ChatGPT plugins launched and with their big announcement like Expedia and Kayak, who I believe is owned by Expedia, both coming out with integrations for using ChatGPT. And it makes a lot of sense, right? You could, instead of having to go to Expedia and click a bunch of drop downs and change all of your settings to have the perfect trip you could be a lot more vague and get a lot more information using Expedia or kayak.com's API so you could say something like I have a group of three people and we're looking to travel sometime in the spring we really like these five countries and we'd love to go to somewhere with you know some waterfalls and somewhere that's really popular for beach destinations whatever and then you could give some stipulations and it could go and you could say like i'm looking for things that within this price range you could you can say things in a lot like ranges essentially is what i'm saying it's a lot easier to give ranges to something like chat gpt whereas when you're looking at something on expedia or kayak normally you're saying i'm looking for these and these dates with this many people um and i want to go to this destination and then it will give you you know quotes for that so i think there was a really cool use case for this where um it could give you really customized personalized results based off of what you're looking for in a way that it wasn't really possible to do before.

1:34So obviously, ChadGPT had a big impact on travel. Now, why is that important for today? So today, Priceline, which is Expedia's big competitor, a big travel agency company, they announced that they're going to be using Google's AI to power their virtual travel agent. And I think this is a really interesting story right now because with the way travel is going and with the way AI in general is going and the way it's getting integrated into every line, you very often see that one of the easiest ways to do this is everyone is just grabbing an API to open AI and integrating it into the products. I think this is a really interesting point where we're seeing, you know, one of the biggest, one of the big competitors in a space kind of go against that.

2:18And instead of partnering directly with, um, directly with open AI, they're going with Google. Now this is kind of interesting and I'm not sure how much this plays into it. But for those that don't know, Expedia, who is kind of regarded as one of the biggest online travel agencies, was actually a spin out from Microsoft way back in the day, I believe this the 90s. And what happened was there was an internal team there that were working on ways to create essentially internet companies is kind of around the dot com bubble area. And Expedia was a spin out where it was like, you know, Microsoft was testing different use cases of the internet and Expedia was very successful.

2:57So it ended up getting spun out as its own company. It was its own travel company. I'm not sure if Microsoft owns shares in that company or what the arrangement there was. I do know that, you know, around the time Microsoft had a lot of issues around anti-competitive stuff. And so I'm assuming they didn't really want to convolute their business, you know, like, oh, we have this travel arm and we have, you know, the Windows arm and all these different arms. And so Expedia was sold off or spun off into its own independent company. Now, the reason I bring that up is because I do think it is very interesting that with the launch of ChatGPT, Expedia and Kayak, which is owned by Expedia, were chosen as like the two travel examples that got early access to GPT-4.

3:36They got to integrate GPT-4 into their platforms before anybody else. They got to create GPT-4 plugins on ChatGPT's platform before anybody else. and I wonder if that is because they had ties to Microsoft and if Microsoft was able to pull that or simply because they're just one of the biggest I'm not sure but in any case it does make it more interesting now that Priceline their big competitor isn't going the same route isn't doing the same thing but it's going with Google and I wonder if this is you know they're worried that you know perhaps Expedia is always going to have the one up they always have the in when the new GPT-5 Model comes out it's gonna be expedia that gets a first and price lines gonna be left in the dust So I'm and you know, there's like preferred vendors essentially going on with this So I'm not sure if that's the case or why but perhaps Google approach them, but it is interesting that Priceline is going with Google and this is one of the first big companies I've as I've said that is going with Google and I think this is a really awesome thing for the ecosystem It's showing that we do have a lot of options and I think this is gonna be really powerful now that being said I believe that I believe that there is a lot of different benefits to going with Google.

4:47And one of those is a lot of the new tools from Google's cloud division. They give Priceline access to some really powerful generative AI that they have been building. And I think that this is going to, I think just partnering with their cloud division, perhaps Priceline is also by doing this, getting a deal on the cloud computing and those costs as well. So this will be interesting for Priceline, I think, you know, really embracing this new technology is going to help with a lot of different, a lot of different travel features that they have. And I think that they're really exploring right now how this entire AI segment is impacting travelers.

5:26And as you look at it, you know, it's big rival Expedia has said that ChatGPT is going to power all the conversations on their smartphone app, on their website. And it's going to give them, it's going to give a lot of travelers inspiration on places to book. So not just, you know, answering their query, but also, you know, kind of pre search trying to help them find places to book ahead of time. And so I think we're going to be seeing these big these two big companies duking it out between Microsoft and Google. And I think this is awesome for the ecosystem. I'll be really excited to see if there's other apps that decide to go with Google over OpenAI and to see, you know, what the differences in the products that are coming out of that.

6:08But in any case, I think this is a really big move and I will be definitely following this very closely in the future.