Expedia’s CEO on the U.S. tourism slowdown, AI, and 2026 travel predictions | Leadership Next

0:00And so I went home one day and I thought, if I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail being myself, being authentically myself. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people and trends that are shaping the future of business. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Leadership Next. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. Kristen, this is our last interview of the year. I'm feeling wistful. I'm also feeling wistful, Diane. I feel like we started the year talking about travel with the booking holding CEO, Glenn Fogel. We are ending the year talking about travel with Expedia CEO, Ariane Gorin.

0:38And what a year it's been. It's not been a great year for the U.S. You know, tariffs, honestly, some of the immigration stuff. It's, I think the U.S. is estimated to be down between$9 and$12 billion from where it could have been. Yeah, your countrymen don't want to come visit us. Canadians are sitting on their hands, but Expedia has had a good year. They have, you know, they are really leaning hard into AI, which I think is really smart. They're partnering with OpenAI, Perplexity, a lot of those big tech companies to mainly have that their tech is integrated onto the systems. I suspect that an LLM may buy them at some point.

1:12It's possible. But we will see. We'll see. We'll have to see how they do. And I also think, you know, they are positioned well because they have a couple different revenue streams. They have Vrbo, VRBO, whatever you want to call it. They have Hotels.com, similar to how Booking has OpenTable in those as well. I thought you were going to mention Reels. So I think they've been a very creative company. And I think that her experience at Microsoft and BCG shows up as well as the time she spent in Europe. So I think some really interesting aspects of her background that she's brought to the travel realm.

1:45And frankly, those of you who are stuck in Europe, you fall in love with a guy and you're looking for a job. Ariane is your girl to help you figure out what your next career step is going to be. And I'm excited to hear about the 2026 travel trends, too. I think she has a lot of data and she'll tell us where to go next, hopefully. Yep. So we will be right back with Ariane after this break. Jason Garzadas, CEO of Deloitte US and sponsor of this podcast, joins us now to talk about maximizing business transformation with AI agents. Great to see you, Diane. Nice to be here. So what should CEOs consider as they assess and prioritize use cases for AI agents?

2:26I think this is on the topic of every CXO conversation I'm a part of, and I think the thought process has to be looking for high impact areas that may not be necessarily the most glamorous or high profile functional areas, but are ripe for automation and use of this technology to create efficiencies as well as innovation. And over time, AI agents will be also in customer facing and growth-oriented domains. In our case, Deloitte, we're using it within our finance organization, looking at very mundane processes like expense management and working capital management. We're seeing other organizations use it in call centers and with software development that can be automated.

3:12What are the key elements for successfully implementing AI agents? Yeah, it comes down to intentionality. And so I think that intentionality in going functional area by functional area in concert with business and IT leadership at an enterprise. It needs to be a mainstream business planning effort that's budgeted, that KPIs are developed, and there's real accountability for actual business outcomes and impact because of agentic capabilities. Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Jason. Thank you. Thank you. So, Aria, nice to see you. And, you know, I know so many people now who say, oh, I just planned my trip on ChatGPT.

3:52So I feel like we have to start with AI, how that's impacting your business for good or for ill. Well, I would start by just putting it in the context of how I think about AI, which is, it's really the third chapter for us as a company. The first chapter was when Expedia was born and, And we went on the internet. And it was really 30 years ago. 30 years ago next year, that's right. And it was about how do you make travel more accessible to people by putting it on the internet, on the website. Then there was the mobile. And that was about how do you take that experience and put it on a smaller screen and make that just as effective, interesting, engaging.

4:32And this third chapter is how are we all going to use AI to help people better plan, discover, book, and then experience travel? Because it isn't just about the planning. It's also about, you know, what are the things that happen in trip? What are the recommendations? You know, how if there's an issue that comes up, can you be serviced and the like? So I think AI is, you know, again, we're still in the early days, but it's going to help us all do even better what we already do, which is help people travel. And you're partnering with some of the big tech companies, you know, OpenAI, Google Perplexity.

5:07Tell us a bit more about that, what that means for you and what it looks like. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in only do what only you can do and partner for the rest. And, you know, we are great at understanding what travelers want. We're great at having relationships with hotels and airlines and turning that into bookings. But we know that people will start sometimes their travel planning in ChatGPT, in Google, in perplexity. So how do we make sure that our brands are showing up well in those conversational experiences? And, you know, we've been working for years, obviously, with Google and with Bing.

5:44You know, people have been starting their shopping there even before AI. And so now it's about deepening those partnerships. And, you know, and of course, you know, a few years ago, ChatGPT didn't even exist and perplexity didn't exist. So it's been quite fun for our team to challenge ourselves to say, how do we make sure that our brands are showing up well there? So you can now book, like if I, you know, ask ChatGPT, like, oh, I need a car to go X, then up would pop Expedia? Yeah. Well, so we actually announced, I think it was about a month and a half ago, we were one of the first partners. Well, we were in the first partners in ChatGPT with what they call their micro apps.

6:22It's basically that when you're in ChatGPT, you can sort of call up Expedia and say, Expedia, I'd like to find a hotel in Paris that has these criteria. And then it's almost as though the Expedia app will pop up within ChatGPT and then you link out to our app. But it's a really interesting time because a lot of these companies are still exploring what is the best experience for users. And that's to be defined in the quarters to come. One of the things with AI, because we're still in this experimental stage, is we start to also run into some of the things we don't want it to do. And I think about personalization on pricing, for example, because you could see that being an obvious use case.

7:06It knows who I am. is that when you start to think about some of the risks of AI, since we talk about it certainly in journalism, et cetera, what are the risks that you see on the travel front, what we don't want it to do that it may be capable of doing? I think the number one thing is that AI can still hallucinate. And when someone is planning and booking their travel, it's not like buying a t-shirt. It's one, it tends to be a larger purchase. So you want to make sure you get it right. Two, if something goes wrong or you get in trip and you aren't getting what you had expected, you know, someone needs to help you solve that.

7:46But importantly, you're never going to get that time back. And time is probably the thing that we have that's the most precious. And so I think the number one thing is really about how do you make sure that even when you're planning with AI, that the information is accurate so that your trip goes well. Going along with that, I need to ask you about Expedia trip matching because I am of the generation where I look at Instagram Reels and I plan my vacation and save them all in Instagram. I've dabbled in one Reel myself, although it was not very good. Not true. Thank you, Diane. Number one fan over here of my Reels.

8:24But I'm curious about this AI-powered tool. Is this really your kind of bet on Gen Z and the next generation? So what trip matching is, is it's basically taking a reel that people can see on Instagram, you know, sending it to the Expedia agent in Instagram, and we will turn it into an itinerary. We'll say, this is what's happened. And then you can link out to the Expedia app and be able to book it. That started with the insight that more and more people's inspiration for travel is starting with social, whether it's in Instagram and TikTok and Snap. It can be across any of them. So, yes, it's a way to obviously appeal to a younger demographic, Gen Z and the like, but it's also, I mean, it's sort of across demographics.

9:12And we are always looking for how can we make our brands and get our brands to show up where travelers are and to make trip planning easier. And so the insight of a lot of people get inspired by reels that they see, but then they don't know, well, where is that? Or how could I book that? You know, we could make it easier. So it's just the beginning. So I want to talk about your own background, how you got into this, but let's first just give people a sense of where Expedia fits in this ecosystem. Because you've got booking, you know, you've got Airbnb. I mean, there's a lot of different, you know travel sites give us a sense of Expedia you've had a very good year by the way so congratulations what differentiates you from your competitors so actually let me step back and talk about Expedia Group and then the brand Expedia of course because the brand Expedia right exactly booking holdings there's booking.com and other brands so within Expedia Group we have three big consumer brands.

10:16We have Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo. And then we have a B2B business where we power the travel programs of a lot of other companies, whether it's corporate travel companies, banks and credit card companies, a lot of loyalty rewards in there, other online travel agencies. When you look at our consumer brands, Expedia is the biggest. And Expedia is really, we call it, it's the one place to go when you want to go places because it's a one-stop shop, whether it's with flights, hotels, vacation rentals, cars, cruise, activities, you can really get everything you need for a trip. And the value proposition is around bundle and save.

10:57The more you book, the more you save because you can dynamically package parts of the trip together and get savings. Or if you start with your flight and then a week later you come back to book your hotel, you can get discounts because you booked the flight with us. So Expedia really, I would say, its superpower in the ecosystem is this one-stop shop, bundle and save. Then we've got Hotels.com, which is really a pure play. Think of Hotels.com. It's the one large hotel specialist that has a broad selection of hotel inventory and a great loyalty program. It's actually one of the brands that's used a lot by unmanaged business travelers, sort of get in, get out, book quickly, know what you're going to get.

11:43And then Vrbo is a vacation rental specialist. It is, I sometimes call it, it's the OG, right? It's the original vacation rental by owner. and it's you know it's while others may be adding other things their vacation rental offering we think that by being a pure play and focusing on being excellent in vacation rentals by being trusted in vacation rentals that there's a lot of growth potential still there. Now I'm curious because I feel like Expedia has been so well known with U.S. consumers and it's you know it's something that we all hear about all those brands are something I think that is talked about very in a lot of pop culture.

12:20Booking, I feel like, has been more European-based, outside of the U.S. How do you see this both? And are you feeling any pressure from booking as they're making these acquisitions to come closer to home? Look, Expedia is true. We're headquartered in the U.S. The brand was founded in the U.S. And if you look across our consumer portfolio, we have a bigger part of our business in the U.S. than booking holdings, for example. But there are countries outside of the U.S. where our brands are well-known and perform really well. Canada and the U.K. are very big markets for us. France is a big market for Hotels.com.

12:58There's some markets in Asia that are big for us. As we came out of the pandemic, we went through a lot of technology replatforming work, especially in our consumer business. And when we did that, we pulled away somewhat from some of the markets outside of the U.S. And in the last two years, we've been pushing back in. The great thing is we've still got really good brand recognition. And as the product has gotten better, we're seeing much faster growth outside of the U.S. than we are in the U.S. So we're out there taking share. And it's an opportunity for us. The U.S. Well, we'll get to that later because what a market.

13:36Good and bad, right? I'm from Canada and there's a lot of people just sitting on their hands until the tariff stuff passes. But let me get to you for a second, because you were at BCG, Microsoft. What attracted you to this business? So I had been at Microsoft for 10 years, from 2003 until 2012. I was living in France at the time. And it had become clear to me that if I wanted a job with real decision-making power and a bigger impact on the business, I'd have to move to Seattle. And at the time, for family reasons, I didn't want to move back to the U.S. And I got a call from Expedia. And what I loved about Expedia Group was, one, it was in travel and technology.

14:21I love travel and I love technology. And that's where there's growth. The second thing is it was still and still is a fragmented market and a growing market. So that, you know, it tells me there's going to be disruption and technology can play a role there. You know, the third thing was this was a U.S. tech company with real centers of decision-making power outside of the U.S. At the time, we had three members of the leadership team who were based in Europe, which was pretty rare for a U.S. tech company. And then finally, I loved the people I'd met. And the pitch that they made to me was, Arianne, we're hiring you not just for this role to run the relationships with the hotels around Europe, but also for your potential trajectory in the company.

15:06and turned out that they were true. And so, you know, all of those things combined really attracted me to the company. Can I ask one other thing, which is really, you mentioned that you took a job nobody wanted when you moved from Paris to London. You said it in an interview with Fortune to lead the affiliate networks. For people who are starting out, talk about why nobody else wanted that job and why you took it. So I had been a year into the company and I was running the relationships with the hotels, as I said, in Europe, Middle East, Africa. And this role to run the Expedia affiliate network came up.

15:44At the time, it was less than 10 % of the business in the company. And the 90 % was really our consumer businesses. And that was what the company was known for. That was where there was a lot of pride around brand Expedia and Hotels.com. And the B2B business at the time, again, less than 10 % of the company was sort of flatlined in growth. And there was a perspective of, you know what, everything is going to get eaten up by the online business, whether it's our brands or other brands. So what opportunity is there for this B2B business? And I thought, you know what, okay, sure, nobody else in the company wants it.

16:25Well, not many people want it. And for me, it's an opportunity to run a full P &L, to run a product and tech team. My coach at the time said, Arianne, it's like you're on the practice track because it's sort of a real P &L where you're going to learn to run product and tech and make the finance decisions and all of that. But it's not so big that if you screw it up, it's going to be a massive problem for the company. And I always thought, OK, I'm on the practice track. But it was great because it was something that there weren't super high expectations on. So I was able to go in, make my assessment, take some risks.

17:03You know, the first two months, I traveled all around the world and met with partners in all different countries, met with our teams. And the conclusion I came to is we are going to go where our own brands can't or don't go. And there is a huge amount of travel that happens with offline retail agents. There's a huge amount of travel that happens with corporate travel agents. There's a huge amount of travel that happens with online travel agents in China or Indonesia where our own brands aren't strong. So that insight helped me figure out where can we grow this business. And then I was able to just go implement a strategy around it.

17:40But again, I think it probably helped that I was still a bit of an outsider in the company. I'd only been there a year. And I thought, why not? Okay, Erin, I'm going to ask you just to give us a good story here. So is there a moment or even a trip since you are CEO of Expedia that really you think fundamentally changed you as a leader and really shaped your leadership style today? Actually, it was a trip right after I got the job running the Expedia affiliate network. And I went and I remember it was this two week, this one, but it was a two week trip. And I flew from London to Tokyo. I did a night in Tokyo, a night in Seoul, a night in Hong Kong.

18:22And like, I was literally sort of going city by city. And each time I met someone from our team and I met two partners. And I was a year into the company. I didn't know anything about the affiliate network. But I went into that trip thinking, okay, I need to get feedback from partners. I need to learn about the business. And how do I not look like I don't know what I'm talking about? So I thought, what do I know? I know the supply side well. I know hotels well. And fundamentally, when we're partnering with these companies, we're selling them our hotels. So I decided I'm going to go in. I'm going to listen.

18:59but I'm always going to pivot back when I need to to something I'm confident in, which was the hotels. So that was the first thing I really learned, which is, you know, make sure that you know where is the thing that's your strength that you can lean on if there's a moment of sort of discomfort in a meeting. You know, the second thing was listen to your team. So, you know, meeting people on the ground in all of those countries really helped shape my strategy. And I think those were sort of two things that do shape how I lead today. I listen to partners. I listen to the outside world. I always tell the team we can't be too insular.

19:35The truth is actually outside of the walls of the company, not in the walls of the company. And then listening to the employees, listening to the team. How is Brand USA doing? How are you thinking about just inbound travel to this country? Earlier this year, we definitely saw a dip in inbound travel into the U.S. It was most pronounced, as we were saying earlier, with Canadians. We're now just about, you know, I shared on the earnings about a month ago, we're just about back to levels from a year ago, even if Canada hasn't recovered. I think next year is going to be a very big year for us. The 250th anniversary, the World Cup.

20:15And there are so many things for people to explore in the country that, you know, I think Brand Expedia will always do well. There's such a richness in the country. And we should recognize that when people choose where they're going to travel and where they're going to spend money, they have a lot of options. And so how do we make sure that we're telling the story of the U.S. well enough? We are making it welcoming, that we're making the infrastructure welcoming, we're making it easy to come to the country. I think that those are things we all have to keep in mind. But this country has so much to offer.

20:50I also want to talk on the flip side of that about locations that are also over traveled and people are going to too much. So I know that is an important issue to you. But I'm I'm wondering if you'd walk us through, you know, what do you think your responsibility is in these types of situations to make sure that make it so expensive? Nobody can go there. Yeah, exactly. So we work with a lot of tourism organizations and countries to help travelers discover some of the more off the beaten path cities. So, for example, if someone is, you know, traveling to Lisbon in Portugal, how do we help them discover that, you know what, there's a sort of their towns all around that you can go spend a few days in?

21:37It's a real subject for countries, not only over tourism, but also bringing economic wealth to smaller towns that may not be as known. So we'll work with local tourism boards to help them present itineraries or just to promote destinations that are less known. Actually, a good example is the south of France. Obviously, there are peak times when there's over tourism there. But then on the off season, it is tougher. They have fewer people visiting. So we worked with the tourism board in France to do a campaign around visiting some of these destinations in the south of France on off-peak season. See, that's good because by the time I feel like I find out about a place on social media, I'm almost scared to go there because I'm like, oh, it's going to have so many people.

22:22Smart travel health check. That's a smart idea. So then what are your 2026 travel predictions? Hit us with what you think is going to happen. Well, first of all, I think a lot of people are going to come to the U.S. We've got the World Cup. We have the 250. So that, you know, I don't think I'm going to surprise anyone on that. You know, we have a trend that we call set jetting and set jetting is based on what people see on TV. They want to go travel. So they see Emily in Paris, White Lotus. So whatever hot destinations there are in TV and movies and like people are going to go. We also released a trend recently that is all about people disconnecting and using vacation as a way to read and just go to a quiet place, disconnect and read, whether it's a cabin or a city break.

23:09That must be, I think younger generations are more conscious of the need to do that. Yeah, it's a detox. It's sort of, it's a digital detox. And by the way, I think that's one of the most beautiful things in travel is that you're out there in the real world meeting people, experiencing things, not on our devices. Even if we use our devices as a way to book our travels. Yeah, there you go. I'm with you there. And is the K-shaped economy, is that very much playing out in travel too, right? Where you've got a very upper tier bespoke experience and then people looking for value at the bottom. I mean, the beautiful thing about travel is you have it sort of, you know, there's demand all across the board.

23:50If you look at the industry, there has certainly been softness at the lower end of the market. You hear hotel chains talking about lower REVPAR, revenue for available room, whereas the upper end of the market is still doing fantastically well. But, you know, if I look at our business, and again, this was something I shared a month ago on earnings, we still saw sort of strength across the board, even if there was more acceleration on the high end. And some of that, I believe, is that on maybe the lower end of the market, you're seeing more deals. You're seeing more sales. So as travelers are looking for more deals, the hotels, the airlines and the like are responding so that people are still able to travel just at a more affordable price point.

24:33Do you see any big generational travel differences, how Gen Z is traveling versus how boomers are traveling? What's most interesting to you there? She always forgets Gen X. I know. There's certainly the way of how are they planning. We talked about that earlier as the younger generation are doing more planning through social and the like. The other thing is the younger generation's more interested in environmental concerns and what's the impact of the footprint of my travel. And also still more budget conscious. Obviously, sort of some of the older generations may be planning more family or group travel.

25:15But I would say there are fewer differences than you would imagine. We all want a good time. Everybody wants to travel. So I want to end off on the fact you mentioned you had a coach. And I wish I'd had a coach. I didn't. But what's the best advice that your coach gave you or anybody else gave you, especially at a time when the job market's changing a lot for younger people? So if you orient it to advice that you think others can learn from. Well, I'm going to have two. And they didn't necessarily come from a coach, but I'll give you my personal stories that may help in the advice. So I had moved to France in 2001, and I worked for the Boston Consulting Group.

25:53And after a year, I decided that I wanted to stay in France because I'd met the person who's now my husband. And so I had to leave BCG because if you transferred, you had to leave after a year. and I started looking for a job. And I must have interviewed, I mean, I must have sent 100 CVs, interviewed with dozens of French companies, and they didn't know what to do with me. Because even if I was half French, I'd done my studies in the US, and I was just rejected left, right, and center. And so I finally thought, you know what, Ariane, this is not working. What else could you do? And so I decided to look for a US tech company with their European headquarters based in France.

26:36And I didn't care what the job was, but I wanted to get into that company. And there was Microsoft and there was IBM. And I got a job at Microsoft. It was called the Prove-It Manager. I mean, it was like the worst title ever. I took a 30 % pay cut, but I wanted to get into the company because I knew, I bet on myself. I thought, I'm going to go in. I'm going to make my way up. I'll prove myself and go from there. And so I think the lesson in that is, one, if you're trying the same thing over and over again and it's not working, pivot. Exactly. It's the definition of insanity. And two, bet on yourself.